I’ll start by saying I’m mostly an Xbox gamer and that my desktop PC isn’t exactly assembled with state of the art gear but it generally handles gaming titles coming out recently quite well. It currently runs with an Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 CPU @2.80Ghz with 4gb ram and a Geforce GTS 250 1gb. Most if not all games run with graphic settings all the way up without any noticeable performance loss, right up until I got my hands on Fallout: New Vegas.

I noticed some FPS loss (sometimes drastic) mostly when NPCs were about to show on screen or were already on my field of view and I thought to myself the game’s engine must’ve had a serious overhaul but I couldn’t really spot where since it all seemed like a Fallout 3 visual experience.

I proceeded to update my nvidia drivers (was using really old ones) and that improved things a bit but I still had some FPS drops.

Then I googled it a bit and found out a lot of folks were having the same issues, including Xbox gamers, so it must be a nasty bug on the game and needs to be patched asap. While we wait for a patch though, I found a fix that worked for me right here. Quoting from the site:

“This .dll file is essentially a light-wrapper for a ‘supported’ video card’s .dll, which tricks the game into configuring its FaceGen software (which was causing the problem) in a more efficient manner. “

I dropped it in the specified folder and everything runs mega smoothly now even with all the graphic settings turned all the way up.

I’m glad I didn’t get the Xbox version if the FPS drop issue is anywhere near the PC one, at least till a patch fixes it. Even then I don’t think I’ll get it though, the PC version is a lot more versatile in terms of mods we can apply to the game. Naked NPCs running aroud mod, anyone?