Fallout 1 Screen Tearing

Z

zerth11

First time out of the vault
I'm having some trouble with Fallout 1 - scrolling the screen causes really bad screen tearing. It's noticeable just by starting a new game and scrolling around the first cave, and it makes the experience pretty unpleasant. I have two computers, both using the GOG version of Fallout + the latest version of Fixt (Fixes Only, Purist), and it happens on both:

  • WinXP, GeForce 8400
  • Win7 x64, Radeon 7790

I've tried everything I can think of - forcing vsync through CCC/Nvidia Control Panel and trying different graphics modes/refresh rates/color depths in f1_res_Config, but nothing seems to help. I also noticed that the screen tearing is present before installing Fixt if I launch the game unpatched. Has anyone else experienced this? The fact that it's happening to me on two very different machines makes me think I've overlooked something simple. Thanks!
 
Have you tried setting Compatibility Mode for the Falloutw.exe?

Right-click on the exe, Compatibility tab, try various configs, but usually the Windows XP or Win95 or Win98 will work. Me personally I just wing it and try different options until it works. Shouldn't take too long.
 
Thanks for the suggestion; unfortunately, even trying the various compatibility settings doesn't seem to help me. With any OS earlier than XP I get some kind of DirectX 3.0 error when I launch the game - renaming ddraw gets rid of that, but then the screen tearing still remains. Any setting from XP onwards similarly does nothing to help the game scroll properly.

It's weird, almost like the internal game function which redraws the screen during scrolling cannot sync up with my video drivers.

I suspect it's something with my machines, as I had the exact same problem when I recently played Arcanum. However, Arcanum had a great command-line argument called -scrollfps. When I would set that to 60 (or even 30, if I didn't want the scroll to be so zippy), I'd get nice, even, tear-free scrolling.
 
Apologies for the late response, I've been working a lot lately:

Have you tried removing/disabling f1_res and ddraw in the Fallout folder?

What about updating DirectX on those machines and also running Windows Update? http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=8109

Also it's a longshot and probably completely unrelated, but are all your C++ Runtimes up-to-date?
VC++ redist 2005: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26347
VC++ redist 2008: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26368
VC++ redist 2010: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26999
VC++ redist 2012: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679

These and other steps are in the Troubleshooting link in my signature.
 
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