What sort of performance/quality should I be expecting from Fallout 3?

[ToastWiz]

So I know Fallout 3 is 4 year old but my PC seems to be struggling with it. When I initially started the game it detected that I should use Ultra High Quality, which was fine. I started to play and realised that the resolution was extremely low and I was suffering from some extreme mouse lag, which I fixed by altering the pre-rendered frames in the NVIDIA control panel (and of course disabling vsync). I also turned the quality up to my native resolution, 1920 x 1080 and found I still had a frame rate issue. I ended up changing to high quality and turning off both AA and AF. Should I be lagging with these specs or is this expected? I play most other games just fine with most settings maxed.

Specs:
Intel Core i5-2310 @ 2.90GHz (4 cores)
NVIDIA Geforce GTS 450 1GB
6GB DDR3 RAM
Windows 7 64-bit

 

[HEXiT]

thats pretty much what is expected with that card and setup...
the gpu is a little weak to run 1080p without dropping frames but its likely the draw distance thats your biggest hindrance most settings you should have on high but some should most def be on low. things like soft shadow and soft smoke eat up gpu cycles for not much in the way of image quality. same with shadow quality. draw distance should be no higher than half way if you only have a 1 gig card.

 

[jaguarskx]

You can download the following mod for Fallout 3 which should help with performance.

http://fallout3.nexusmods.com/mods/13520/

They have a huge library of user created mods so it's worth checking out. Note that some mods may conflict with other mods created by other people.

 

[ToastWiz]

thats pretty much what is expected with that card and setup...
the gpu is a little weak to run 1080p without dropping frames but its likely the draw distance thats your biggest hindrance most settings you should have on high but some should most def be on low. things like soft shadow and soft smoke eat up gpu cycles for not much in the way of image quality. same with shadow quality. draw distance should be no higher than half way if you only have a 1 gig card.

Yeah I pretty much anticipated this, I was just curious because I can run all Valve games maxed (Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2) but I guess the Source engine is just excellently optimized. Thanks for your help!