DanRocco

The fix involving replacing atiumdag.dll seems to have worked for me. I went from crashing every 30 seconds no matter what I was doing in-game to a crash-free play session spanning hours. If you're an ATI/AMD card user, try it out, and let us know how it works. I added this info to the I made 3 weeks ago. If the fix works for you, please go leave a comment there, too.

Yeah I kept expecting it's my cheapo psu, I'll bet when my 750w seasonic 80+ gold efficiency gets here it'll work. :thumbsup: That's the exact PSU I'm using, and yet here I am in this crash report thread.

I've been following the thread from the damn near beginning and posted many times, just trying to contribute to potentially solving this rather than waiting 2 more weeks and hope Bethesda addresses this in the patch. Now kindly blow it out your ass. Jace was a bit harsh, and didn't quite get at the real issue: This is a troubleshooting thread, and it has been established that nothing we've tried so far reliably or permanently fixes the issue. Continuing to suggest non-working solutions is unfair to the people just now finding this thread. Contributing would be trying different things, and reporting your results. And on that note, I'm sad to report that I will be playing on my borrowed GPU until the Star Wars MMO is released, and then Skyrim won't see any playtime from me for probably months. Good luck getting this nasty little bug swatted, guys.

I work at an electronics store, and borrowed a GT430 from the tech shop's stash. No more black screens, but I'm getting 2 other different types of crash. Freaking buggy-ass game.

I have what might be bad news. There's a chance the issue lies with my graphics card and NOT the game after all. I borrowed an old ATI card to try out, and everything works fine, despite looking and performing like crap. I got no black screens long past where I experienced my first one with my own GPU. This explains why playing from a separate HDD didn't work. I still think it's a problem with SOME 6850s and 6870s, and possibly others in the same "HD" series. Mine is an HIS IceQ X Turbo X HD6870.

The issue covered in this thread does not involve a pop-up of any kind. It is a sudden, total loss of connection in the video card, followed by a total lockup of the computer. I recorded it happening to me in Whiterun:

Here's something interesting... I underclocked using throttlestop again. This time a little lower than before, but I don't think it even matters. As an experiment, I thought I'd try standing in place without touching any controls. I just loaded the game and let it sit there for a while. It lasted a few minutes, which is way longer than the last ten times I've tried. But then the screen started slowly moving around my character (because I'd been AFK too long), and within 2 seconds, CRASH, black screen. I'm thinking that the issue lies with removing or overwriting GPU memory (at least for me). It was able to load the game fine, and as long as no change took place on-screen it was also fine. Does this sound absurd?

I used throttlestop instead of Windows. I took the multiplier down from 34 to 26, so I was operating at 2.2GHz instead of my usual 3.3GHz. Not only did I crash, but I crashed at the exact same spot in Whiterun as shown in the video I posted. Any chance I can get a step-by-step to make sure I'm doing this right? EDIT: I also just tried using WIndows instead, setting min 20% and max70%. ...CRASH

Thank you, seanie. Now, does it matter whether I change the max load in Windows if I'm using throttlestop? Or should I leave it set to 100% in the power-saving options, and just reduce the multiplier in throttlestop?

Explain to me what that means, exactly, and I'll give it a try, heh. (Also, here's a Youtube video of me reproducing the BSC in Whiterun: )

thats what i was saying peoples pc a shutting down to protect damage from over heating, i made a change in my power options to bring my temps down and now the game works fine I just tried running it with my CPU fan speed jacked up... and a box fan pointing directly into my open computer case. It crashed, and I got it on film this time. YouTube link on the way...

I just want to report that I tried as Greg suggested and installed a fresh version of windows on a spare HDD to run the game. Absolutely no drivers except the latest display drivers were installed. All settings were left at the recommended levels (High). I black screened during the opening sequence, even before character creation. I was NOT using a save state, and indeed have installed nothing on this HDD except for Steam and Skyrim (and the day 1 patch). The crash intervals are definitely getting shorter, leading me to believe it is a memory corruption issue like someone suggested earlier. It's really sounding like either we all have malfunctioning video cards (unlikely) or some element of the game (probably early on) introduces a feedback loop of bad memory writes/reads in the gpu. I don't know enough about how games interact with the GPU to know whether this idea holds water.

Do they also use the same game settings as you do? Or did they edit the Skyrim.ini or SkyrimPrefs.ini in any way? Are both patched with the day 1 patch? All three of us are using high settings (of course, by now I've tried dozens of arrangements), and none of us have edited the .ini files.

And yet I know at least 2 people with the exact same hardware setup as me who are running the game with no problems. One is a digital download, the other a retail copy. It's almost like the problem is an incompatibility with our brainwaves or something. Someone should try underclocking their frontal cortex and trying again. :wallbash: EDIT: Mine is a DVD copy.

^^^ Ah, sorry. I totally agree. OP, are you listening in on this? :tongue: EDIT: Oh, and could someone who has purchased the game legitimately please test out a downloaded copy (via p2p) and report back here? I am at work currently, or I'd do it myself. <--- I do not mean to implicitly support piracy, and fully intend to uninstall and delete any downloaded copies of the game once there is a working patch, even if that means losing my current progress. I just want to play this game that I have shelled out money for.

Myself and others have put together similar lists at different points in the troubleshooting process. The one you're referring to is probably the most complete so far. That's not how it should work. I also plan to download the game, which I will play only until a satisfactory patch is released (assuming the downloaded game works, of course). If you are dissatisfied with the game enough to return it, then you don't get to play it legally, and you don't get to take the moral high-ground if you pirate it anyway. If you still want to play it, I urge you to hold off for a while until a permanent fix is found (or indeed, repurchase the game in anticipation of a fix).

People keep quoting the wrong posts. The "reply" button is at the BOTTOM of the post, not the top. ;)

By "currently only tested it" do you mean that you were having the same problem we're having, (Black Screen Crash) and this solved it? If not, then neither of these are "fixes". They are known solutions for other problems.

For the record, I ran chkdsk before installing the game, and got a clean bill of health. Also, I did previously try playing offline to no avail. I have underclocked, overclocked, enabled 4GB of RAM, ran windowed mode, ran on minimum settings with all effects diabled, uninstalled catalyst, rolled back display drivers multiple iterations, upgraded to beta drivers, uninstalled my discrete sound card, reduced audio quality, removed power-saving features, offered three generations of my eventual progeny as blood sacrifices to an elder demon... nothing works. I await the 1.2 update, and if it's not fixed after that, I will be very sad.

Short answer: Yes. Bethesda requested that anyone with issues post their dxdiag info, but that thread is locked. Someone opened a new thread just for that purpose (the one that I and others have linked to).

It is frustrating but the problem we are experiencing is _hardware failure_ caused by this particular game. It's a lot more serious !! More importantly, it's different. This isn't a "Skyrim is buggy" thread; it's a "Black Screen Crash" thread. By all means, go report your particular issue, and I hope it gets fixed in the next update, just let's keep all of the bug reports separate so there won't be any confusion on Bethesda's part.

For anyone who hasn't yet, please go here, and post your DirectX Diagnostics (inside spoiler tags, please). Be sure to mention the "Black Screen Crash", and link back to this thread. Hopefully Bethesda will make our plight a priority for the upcoming patch.

Guys, we've done a REALLY THOROUGH job troubleshooting this issue. It is not hardware-related, nor will a display driver update likely fix it if it is not game-specific. It is going to take either a direct game patch or a driver update targeting Skyrim specifically. Let's quit stressing over it, shall we? One ruined weekend was enough for me, heh.

Your setup is the same as mine, so I'll try this workaround tomorrow after work. Let me ask you, though: Are you trying any other fixes as well (underclocking, lower graphics, etc.)? What power saving setting(s) are enabled in Windows? And do you mean you just have another Windows user logged in in the background? Thanks.

Maybe it has to go down to 600mHz to have any effect? 775mHz is my minimum. In any case, oh well, there went my weekend. With any luck, this'll be fixed in time to get some substantial play out of the game before SWTOR early access opens up ;)