How will Fallout 3 run on my system?

Now this isn't a question I would normally make a thread for but right now I'm trying to make a choice between playing it on consoles or on my laptop. I don't care all that much for mods, I actually gave up on the PC version of Oblivion for the PS3 because it was such a technical mess, but most importantly it had no gamepad support.

I want to get 60 FPS and if possible a resolution higher than 720p, what can I expect? Similarly how will my system do in Skyrim?

 

Have you seen this review of your laptop? http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-IdeaPad-Z510-Notebook.105627.0.html
That's as good a place to start as any.

This guy has a 740m, but a worse GPU, so expect even better performance in Fallout 3 than this:

Same story here with Skyrim:

 

I believe it will run well. Just loaded up Fallout New Vegas on my 940m at 1080p medium settings and running like a champ at solid 60FPS (locked max FPS by game). Skyrim I have no doubt will run just fine.

 

Fallout 3 is a broken mess on consoles, so you'd be crazy to go that route.

Plus PC has a bajillion mods. Easy choice.

 

Haven't tried Fallout 3 on this laptop, but New Vegas runs about 40-50 fps at 1680x1050 and pretty stable 60fps at 720p.

Skyrim is close to 60fps @720p interior locations, drops a lot outdoors because I run mods that use lots of scripts and greatly increase the number of enemies that spawn.

Fallout 4 is borderline unplayable on lowest settings at 720p, anywhere from 10-25fps.

Your 740M should be quite a bit faster than my 5830M, as you can see here

 

I tried the games and both Fallout 3 and Skyrim run at 60 FPS indoors but outdoors it's 35-45 on the highest settings at 768p and 2x AA.

Whats worse though is that my system for some reason prefers one core at a high speed than multiple cores at a normal speed, which means that the CPU heats up and there are resources going to waste. Because of this I have to limit my CPU speed so when under stress more cores are used instead.

 

Huh that's weird. I'd recommend googling Fallout 3 and Skyrim optimization mods and tweaks. Those could help if you haven't installed any thus far.

 

Did you try tweaking graphics settings? (drop uGridsToLoad down to 3, turn off shadows, AA, grass, lower draw distance, actor fade, object fade, turn off water reflections/refractions, etc)

 

I'll look into tweaks when I start to play them, right now busy with a few other RPGs.

The biggest problem for me though is that unless I put the CPU speed to about 1.5ghz, then only a single core is used which makes a lot of heat (hence throttling GPU) and the fact that other cores are going to waste.

 

uGridstoLoad can be a massive drain on your processor. Each incremental level greatly increases the number of cells loaded into memory, and as a result, the number of actors (NPCs) loaded with scripts running on them. uGrids value of 3 loads the surrounding 9 cells. 5 loads 25 cells, 7 loads 49 cells, and so on. If you have mods running additional scripts on all those actors, the effect is greatly amplified.

 

i'm gonna try playing fallout 3 at 4k with my 880m. should be easy. i'm just trying to see how many mods i could install before hurting the frame rates

 

Notebookcheck states the 740m has variants with a 64bit memory bus. You should use gpu-z and let us know your memory bus and if it is ddr3/gddr5.

...as for AA, try fxaa.

 

Probably the DDR3 version but yes a GPU-Z screenshot would help..