IanHead

My big summary of this problem on the Bethesda forums has been updated a bit. We've tried a registry tweak that increases the time Windows waits for a driver to recover before trying to kill it and restart it... and yes, we tried the ENB mod too. Link to the thread: http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1301174-any-chance-of-a-fix-for-the-hard-pc-crashes-soon

*fist bump* Thanks mate.

I've compiled a fairly exhaustive summary of this thread on the Bethsoft forums, located here. Below is a verbatim copy of my post on there: You might all want to head on over and get this thread noticed over on those forums again, the original thread about hard crashes was merged with their very generic 'Crashes to desktop' thread.

Sadly, I don't think it'd make a difference anyway. The problem lies within the game engine, which the Creation Kit will not allow access to.

By the end of the main quest it's pretty obvious that the question is not "Who is good and who is evil" but rather more along the lines of "Who are the bigger dicks". Every time I'm about ready to declare allegiance to one side, I recall something awful that side has done so I'm put back on the fence again. Just on my way to completing my induction task for the Imperial Legion, I was stopped on a road by three Thalmor justiciars. Upon talking to them, their leader asked down his nose at me whether I worshipped Talos. Upon responding people should worship whomever they like, I was declared a heretic and attacked. After blasting his two cronies of a cliff with Unrelenting Force and taking their mage leader's head off, I reflected on this. The Thalmor have the Empire of Tamriel in their pockets and their ultimate agenda is for high elf supremacy. As soon as I realised giving Skyrim to the Empire really meant giving it to the Thalmor, I immediately turned tail and went to Windhelm to seek out Jarl Stormcloak and join the rabble. Of course, as soon as I got inside the gates, I recalled seeing how a pair of nords were bullying an elf around, calling her a spy &c. As a nord I suppose my character would be carrying nord interests at heart, though I certainly have no distaste for elves (I even ended up marrying Jenassa, a dunmer). At the end of the day, as much of an arse as Ulfric Stormcloak is, and his racist/supremacist tendencies, he is at least interested only in subjugating Skyrim to his ends. He doesn't seem at all concerned with what goes on beyond Skyrim's borders. The Thalmor, on the other hand, already have most of Tamriel under their thumb, and so the choice became slightly easier. If the Thalmor dominated the entire continent there would be little hope of them letting go. Maybe somewhere down the road, with a divided Tamriel at least there would still be some hope for someone new to step up and unite the nations under a truly neutral regime with the interests of the people at heart, no matter their race or creed, just as Tiber Septim did so many yonks ago. As an aside, I love the fact that Skyrim even allows this kind of internal conversation to take place. It goes to show just how well Bethesda have crafted this world and lore. This kind of political intrigue, after playing Morrowind and getting caught up in all the politicking among the great houses, was something I was really missing in Oblivion, which was much more of a straightforward 'good vs bad' fantasy.

Yeah, I have this problem. Getting rid of duplicates works around it.

I've been using that for a couple of weeks - had no effect unfortunately. Tried the MSI Afterburner thing now, too -- didn't seem to do it for me, though it's hard to verify I was doing it right at all - the program doesn't really give any feedback as to whether it's working properly. At this point I'm just waiting for a patch... crashes and all, I've still racked up nearly 60 hours in this bloody game since its release. I need therapy. Mods or OP - maybe this vid should be added to the opening post for this thread?

It's not - that article is wrong.

I've been getting fewer crashes now through no input of my own. It seems to be mostly when entering or exiting the map, or checking the quest log, when the black screen occurs, but it's also happened at random in many other places. Totally a stab in the dark, but I'm wondering if it may be the game's UI system that's triggering these crashes. I think of this because: The HUD is visible at all times during the game. The game likewise is currently known to hard hang at any time. The game appears to crash more often when utilising UI-heavy elements. (based on my account and a few others in this thread) Skyrim uses .swf (Flash) files for its UI. Flash is no stranger to crashing video drivers on all kinds of hardware. I'm not even sure if Skyrim actually runs its own Flash player under the hood at runtime, or whether the Gamebryo Creation engine just interprets .swf files the way it needs to without any actual Adobe Flash binaries, but anyway - just my hypothesis.

Catalyst 11.11 driver is out - doesn't fix the issue.

I sent support an email referring them to this thread - they responded by asking for my dxdiag info. No mention that they're working on a patch, but they wouldn't be asking for that kind of information if they weren't checking this issue out.

Rumor mill is saying 11.11 Catalyst drivers are due in the next day or two, perhaps we'll see some improvement then.

The sad thing is that I feel compelled to play this game even though I know I'll be lucky to get 30 minutes out of it before having to reboot.