CTDs, endless loading screens, violet textures

[Sigurd44]

Ok, I know the CTD threads aren't a rare species in this forums, but here is mine:

 

I experience CTDs or endless loading screens or violett/black texture failures especially after fast travels or sometimes after cell zoning (zoning from indoors to outdoors).

 

I know there might be severals reasons for those issues:

 

-wrong skeleton:

 

I have the default male skeleton installed and the CHSBHC female skeleton with CBBE textures for naked bodies and Remodeled Armor for armor textures. I experience no CTDs while coming in line of sight of certain actors/NPCs, which is usually an effect of an incompatibilty between a skeleton and a mesh. So I guess that's not the reason.

 

-scripts: I know there could be several scripts that cause CTDs whenever this script is launched. The only script in my papyrus log that occures before the "freezing" message is the infamious "MGRitual04QuestScript.psc" (Master Restoration quest) that spams my papyrus in an endless loop. But this issue is already described in the UESP.wiki as a bug, that has no further consequences. My CTD issues already occured with the same lvl of severity before I actually finished that quest and as there was no papyrus spam.

 

-So my guess is, its a texture/meshes based issue or maybe general performance based:

 

Sometimes I need two or three reloads of Skyrim to fast travel to a certain area without a CTD or an endless loading screen and even then I realize often violet textures (might be weapons, or armor or other stuff) or black body textures of my followers.

 

I already realized that with a Skyrim update a few months ago the stability and the performance of Skyrim suddenly decreased a lot, although I changed nothing concerning my mods or my .ini settings.

 

My System:

 

-i7 2600 K

-256 GB Kingston SSD

-16 GB DDR3 RAM

-2 x Asus 670 GTX SLI, 4 GB VRAM each (!) I know the VRAM won't be doubled by a SLI config, but I need the power of those two cards to display Skyrim on my 27'' monitor on 2560 x 1440 resolution

 

 

Grafic settings:

 

16 AF

4x Supersampling AA (override by Nvidia Inspector for the lowest setting of 2x MSAA in the Skyrim launcher)

8x SparseGrid Supersampling transparency AA

Ambient Occlusion quality (high quality is possible by the Inspector, but its not worth it, you will lose 20 fps alone in an indoor area)

 

.ini settings:

 

Nothing special. I returned to uGridtoLoad 5/36 months ago because I suddenly could not load my saved games again after a Skyrim update. In Addition I have standard ultra settings (4096 x 4096 shadow resolution) for example and only tweaked treeLOD to 75000. No exaggerated values for pixels, decals, grass load, just the standard ultra values.

 

The only major tweaks in my .ini are multithreading tweaks to use more cores/threads.

 

-mods:

 

I use up to 80 mods and yesterday I changed some 8k rock textures for only 4k ones in the hope to improve performance, no effect.

 

Usually my system should display Skyrim with those settings without any problems...

 

The CTD/endless loading screen or bugged texture issue occures especially for several loactions:

 

-whenever fasttraveling to one of the stables of a major city (especially Windhelm gives me problems)

-whenever I want to fasttravel to one of my Hearthfire houses

-whenever I want to zone out of an interior of an Hearthfire house into the exterior Skyrim

 

Meanwhile I circumvent most problems by parking NPCs in my houses and collecting the NPC IDs for a "player.moveto" console command to travel to loactions where I usually get at least a couple of CTDs before a fast travel will succeed at last.

[CharrGazgre]

Cool PC spec.

 

For violet textures, I think you probably missing some textures. Which one?

 

For black textures, your PC probably didn't load the textures properly. You can try The console command "pcb" (Purge cell buffers) cleans the cached cells.

[Sigurd44]

The violet ones vary, but often they are NPC armors (to my suprise armors/outfits for male NPCs...I do not use any male armor mod, just Remodeled Armor for female NPCs...) or horse armors (Convenient Horses mod) and/or weapons (JaySuS Swords). I don't think they are truly missing, sometimes they weren't correctly loaded or displayed. A reload for the same scene and items usually solves the problem, the items will be displayed correctly then.

 

Oh, I know many console commands, but this I missed yet, will try it, thx.

[prod80]

Lower your AA settings to free up some VRAM to get rid of load screens hanging

 

As for the clothing/armor textures missing and displaying as purple means you have a problem with your installed textures. Nothing to do with system specs. Uninstall your Clothing/Armor mods... see if the issue is still there (really - it shouldn't) then reinstall them in the correct installation order, taking special care with file overwrites.

 

 

Edit: Oh, just read your last comment... Try freeing up VRAM by lowering AA settings.

[Sigurd44]

Damned I feared that...

 

I wonder why I can't use the above settings while using a 4 GB VRAM card, but if this stops the load screen hanging its a fair trade. Will try normal MSAA and will change the SGSAA to SSAA for tranparency AA.

[prod80]

I run 4K textures on a 4GB card on a single 1920/1080 monitor using NO AA, just FXAA from ENB and I run into 3-3.5GB VRAM... To give you an idea...

[Sigurd44]

This really seems to work.

 

Downgraded

 

from 4x SS to 2x SS / 4x MSAA for "normal" AA

and

from 8x SGSSAA to 8x SSAA for transparency AA

 

and already realize an improvement.

 

Ok, as I am picky I watch the difference. The nice reflections and the gleaming of metallic surfaces I had with 4 x SSAA are somewhat duller now and the downgrading for the tranparency AA you realize a little bit for the last leaves at the end of branches and for specular sweatmaps, but the CTDs and texture failures are a lot less now.. As I run FRAPS I watch that the loading process is running much smoother now too. Formerly the FRAPS fps ocd stuttered a lot in loading screens, now it's counting much smoother. In addition the loading times are much shorter.

 

I never ever thought the grafic settings would have been the reason, but I am pretty glad that I can solve it by doing a few mouseclicks in the Nvidia Inspector, as instead deinstalling and reinstalling tons of mods for hours to evaluate the issue.

[prod80]

Well running 3 HD monitors will look awesome, but it does come with limitations... certainly when using that high AA settings as you had combined with mods.... it's just too much. I run on 1 monitor as I said and absolutely max everything out as I can. My GTX680/4GB runs on 1284 MHz core (from 1006 MHz) and 7100 MHz RAM (from 6000 Mhz - pretty good OC I got, lucky card :wink: ) and I pull around 40-50 FPS outside without using any form of Hardware AA (ENB uses SW AA). So, yea.. heavy stuff really. All my textures are 2K, 4K (most) and 8K right now, combined with ENB all maxed out on quality.

 

It's as far as my system can go...(or Skyrim for that matter) VRAM hitting almost max on my card, TESV.exe program hovering between 2.8 and 3.1GB (will crash @ 3.2GB)... my CPU has a lot of headroom, but upping shadows more (to 8K) will overload the application and cause crashes, unfortunately.

 

I do not know what else to improve about visual fidelity... Hardware AA, yes - but then I lose all the neat stuff of ENB, and forces me to use lower res textures.... ending up with less goodies in the end - imo not worth it. Perhaps you should look into ENB to take a lot of load off your cards using Hardware AA, and simply deal with less than optimal AA and have ENB deal with EdgeAA, use an MSAA injector, have ENB run the Ambient Occlusion for you as well... unload your card a bit in the process and maybe have stuff look a lot better than now. I can help you set it up for test, just send me a PM.

[Sigurd44]

Yeah, I realized the pressure on my cards as I bought that 27'' monitor for 2560 x 1440 resolution. No overcklocking yet. I could simply overclock my grafic card and my CPU (my BIOS even has a preinstalled and stable overclocking profile for my i7 2600K), but I use no water cooling and will get heat problems. At moment I have some problems with cooling the grafic cards (one heats up to ~70°C, there is always one hotter as the other in a SLI system), because it's summer now, in winter I had no problems at all to not get to the 70°C border :-) Ok, I changed my fan cooler routine and now I at least get no throttle down.

 

...but to say this, if you ever watched a mod loaded Skyrim on 2560 x 2440 you never ever want back to "only" HD, it's just amazing.

 

Maybe in future (don't think it will last long) we have grafic cards where the displaying of SSAA and SGSSAA settings are routine. It's still the best AA mode (the difference between MSAA or Nvidia's CSAA and true SSAA is watchable by every normal user and a guy who somewhat has an idea which textures he should look at in a game, will watch differences that should be measured in lightyears...), but the hardware were missing. SMAA is a nice workaround and FXAA can be great, if it is relative well made and hand made for certain games as by mods like RCRNv36, otherwise normal FXAA just blurs to much.

 

I had that idea to use an ENB a few times, but always kept my RCRNv36, because it's relative easy to install, delivers a weather mod too and the ENB mods out there....it's work to read all the stuff and to install such things the proper way. I simply thought I circumvent that with reference hardware...but since there was a certain patch for Skyrim, this does not seem to work anymore...

 

A few months ago I upgraded my RAM from 8 GB to 16 GB. I never ever thought, that a program might ever use 8 GB RAM, til HWinfo showed my a RAM memory load of over 7 GB for peaks for my modloaded Skyrim. As far as I know a system will already adjust processing (and decrease performance) if you come close to a memory limitation, no need to actually reach it, therefore I upgraded. I guess it's the same with VRAM.

 

Anyways, thx for letting me see the obvious.

 

PS: You mentioned 8k resolution mods, I am always looking for high detailed stuff. The only mods I know that use 8k resolution textures are SFO and Benjamin's Rocks. Do you know other ones?