Disabling HDMI Sound From Graphics Card Fixed Crashes.

In an earlier thread I posted that turning the game's music option to "off" made it much more stable (I was experiencing intermittent crashes but not so much as to ruin my game experience), I would listen to Pandora streaming music instead. I still would experience occasional crashes (much more rare than before) and some occasional choppiness.

Following up on that I decided to take a further look at the situation. My situation is that I have an i7 system with an onboard sound chip and use a Radeon 7850 card. I had been using the output from the HDMI port of the Radeon for both the display and the sound output, forcing the card to do double duty. I hadn't noticed problems in any other games with crashes except FC3 but it did seem that the stability issues had much more to do with sound configuration than graphics.

So I disabled the sound on the Radeon and and now utilizing the sound from the onboard chip only. The game is now rock stable even with graphics overclocking re-enabled on the Radeon (I'd disabled it previously in an attempt to improve FC3 stability). As far as I can tell when I use USB headphones for the sound it's also stable. It's also stable when using the game's music.

Hopefully some of the people with stability and crash issues can get some help from this solution!