With less than a month to go, Fallout 4 is so close we can taste it. So after dusting off Fallout 3 or New Vegas, some of us have noticed these originals not performing their best on Windows 7, Windows 8 / 8.1, or Windows 10. Especially if you are using the 64-bit editions of any of those operating systems.
Th solution is quite simple and involves some minor editing of one of the games system files. Depending on your OS, you can find the Fallout.ini file for either Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas in the following folders:
Microsoft Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\My Games\Fallout3
or
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\My Games\FalloutNV
Microsoft Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 / 10
C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\My Games\Fallout3
or
C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\My Games\FalloutNV
Once you located the Fallout.ini file, open it up and look for the following line: bUseThreadedAI=0
Simply change the 0 to a 1. After you have done that, you will need to add another line after that one and insert the following: iNumHWThreads=2
What this tells the game to do is limit the number of cores to 2 which should stop the game from freezing. If the game continues to freeze, try changing the iNumHWThreads=2 to iNumHWThreads=1
If that doesn’t fix it, then the next step is to download the Games For Windows Live client. Now, Games for Windows Live shut down in 2013 but some games still require the client to work. After a lot of hunting around, I finally found the link to download the Full Installation (not just the web installer). And here’s the link. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5549
And that’s as hard as it gets folks. Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas can now be enjoyed on our shiny new gaming systems. I especially love playing this game on my Windows PC connected to a 50″ TV using an Xbox 360 Controller. Sweet Sweet GamePad…… Now you have something to do whilst you wait for Fallout 4 to land in our hands.
