Haven't seen a thread of similar topic, so I thought I'll go ahead and start one. Apologies for long post.

Fallout New Vegas is awesome. It most certainly ranks among my top 10 RPGs of all time. New Vegas with the DLCs is even better, and the mods then take it to stratospheric levels. Unfortunately, with mods that makes extensive changes to NV such as Project Nevada, FOOK, NMC and especially the multitude of ENBs comes a rather hefty price of performance drops. This is in spite of a game released in 2010, using a 2008 engine, and running on a mid-range laptop bought in 2013.

With regards to my personal experience, I use over a 100 plugins, which seems to be quite the norm for users here and on the nexus. I can tolerate the drop in fps (20-30 outdoors, 30-40 indoors) for the sake of enhanced textures, and special effects from ENB. However, a major source of headaches is the extremely long loading times, which I know is definitely caused by the large number of mods. I'm talking 2-3 minutes everytime I try to load my character from the menu, and more than 5 minutes if I quickload after a death. My initial suspicion was that the source of long load times must be one of the major aforementioned mods I'm running.

Then yesterday, I read a 3 year old topic on the nexus forums mentioning something about the famous Millenia's individual weapon mods. I disabled most of the 20+ Millenia weapon mods that I'm using and lo and behold! The loading time now does not exceed 10 seconds!!

Never in a million years would I have suspected individual weapon mods to be the culprit of excessively large save files and long loading screens. As much as I appreciate his high quality work, I am willing to forego his mods. Now I am freakin psyched to resume my New Vegas adventures, with that big issue finally behind me.

So what is everyone's experience with regards to performance issues on Fallout NV/Fallout 3, anything from fps, load time, crashing etc.? Also feel free to suggest any improvements to the game performance.

I recently installed a ENB mod, and it would cause my entire laptop to crash. I'm also very careful about downloading quest mods because they can mess with core elements of the game. Perhaps my biggest issue is my tendency to mess with cities I love. I try to get all sorts of mods to make the cities more elaborate and larger. This causes the game to take a dramatic hit on fps when I entire these areas and even crash at times. I should also mention that MMM is also a pretty big culprit. Increasing the spawns 3 to 5 fold can definitely cause a game to lag and subsequently crash.

Although, I don't own a gaming computer it runs Fallout perfectly but when I first installed mods I also realized the loading screens were taking longer and longer to the point to where it reached a whole minute, but that isn't enough to get me to stop playing such a wonderful and amazing game.

The mods I have had issues with regards the ENBs and FPS drops, although ENBs make NV look absolutely wonderful I can't comprehend why I must take such a sacrifice for something that won't interfere with gameplay but interferes on how I see the game.

itsyoshiduh wrote:

I recently installed a ENB mod, and it would cause my entire laptop to crash. I'm also very careful about downloading quest mods because they can mess with core elements of the game. Perhaps my biggest issue is my tendency to mess with cities I love. I try to get all sorts of mods to make the cities more elaborate and larger. This causes the game to take a dramatic hit on fps when I entire these areas and even crash at times. I should also mention that MMM is also a pretty big culprit. Increasing the spawns 3 to 5 fold can definitely cause a game to lag and subsequently crash.

I can most certainly attest to that. There is a mod that opens up the entirety of Freeside instead of splitting it up into 2 closed sections. To my understanding, an open Freeside is exactly what Obsidian intended, but technical limitations and severely rushed schedule makes it impossible in vanilla. I was quite blown away by what that mod achieved, as it breathes soooo much more life and energy into freeside. And then it crashes to desktop after a couple of minutes, despite using NV4GB. Thankfully, another mod that merges the Strip into one is a lot more stable. And apparently originally intended by the devs as well.

I run F:NV on ultra high settings. I only get crashes because my video card is on it's way out. Loading screens take about 10-20 seconds at most when starting up, but get to about 5-10 seconds at most after playing. I tried out a weapon mod recently that had an activatable flashlight that is attached to the weapon and then i got the drop in about 10-15fps when i turned it on I guess I should try medium settings and see if an ENB wont blow up my video card.

Accelerator wrote:

Although, I don't own a gaming computer it runs Fallout perfectly but when I first installed mods I also realized the loading screens were taking longer and longer to the point to where it reached a whole minute, but that isn't enough to get me to stop playing such a wonderful and amazing game.

The mods I have had issues with regards the ENBs and FPS drops, although ENBs make NV look absolutely wonderful I can't comprehend why I must take such a sacrifice for something that won't interfere with gameplay but interferes on how I see the game.

The bloating of save files with the progression of a character is quite natural it seems, given that there are more and more variables and world states to be accounted for. However, as I previously mentioned, the Millenia weapon mods seem to contribute to disproportionately large save files. With 20+ of Millenia's weapon mods running in a 80+ hours character, the save file reached 17mb and takes several minutes to load (quick save and quick loads at casinos is simply not possible). After disabling most of them, the save file immediately dropped down to 8mb, and only takes a few seconds to load. Something to consider if you are using his weapon mods.

Why not use his Weapons of New Millenia? One mod with a whole bunch of weapons? Or is this what you are speaking of?

mbuster89 wrote:

Why not use his Weapons of New Millenia? One mod with a whole bunch of weapons? Or is this what you are speaking of?

I actually do not know if Weapons of the New Millenia, a single unified mod would contribute as much to the long load times the individual mods, though i have a feeling it will perform better. However, it pretty much contains all of his weapon mods, and I am not too big on seeing some of them in the wasteland, so i'm quite satisified with my current selection (L96A1, M4A1, G3, Aug, G36).

I highly recommend the guide by NCRvet on the stability and performance in the FNV. After applying the recommendations of the number of errors the game has dropped, while the FPS increased.

for some reason when I try to enter freeside my game crashes

New Vegas (and most Bethesda Games) have a hodge-podge of performance issues. They can be caused by:

-Operating System
-DirectX or other runtimes
-Other processes (like antivirus)
-Loading textures and meshes from HDD instead of SDD
-Poor load order
-Minor but expensive tweaks in the .ini files.
-Poorly optimized or script heavy mods.
-etc, etc, etc.

I've spent almost as much time debugging the game as I have playing it. (And I still love it.)