[solution?] random crashes to desktop

[frml]

Hi everybody.

I want to share my wisdom. Maybe someone may find this useful.

 

I recently did a fresh install of Skyrim and installed a bunch of mods. And got plagued by random CTDs as many others.

 

The solution I found is very simple: Get rid of your mods!

Well not all of them. Aim at big texture packs.

The reason is simple. They consume a lot of memory. And if the 32bit address space is exhausted the game crashes.

You can easily track the memory consumption of your game by using a tool like Process Explorer (free tool from Microsoft).

1. Launch Process Explorer then launch Skyrim.
2. When Skyrim has started alt-tab to the desktop and select TESV.exe from the process list.
3. Then right click on TESV.exe and select properties. The properties dialogue pops up.
4. Return to Skyrim. The properties dialogue will stay open even if you exit Skyrim or if it crashes.
5. If Skyrim crashes take a look at the properties dialogue. The interesting tabs are performance (graph) and GPU graph.
6. The goal is to keep the peak private bytes at about 2G. That was save for me and just got me 2h of continues game play.

Why only 2G you ask me? Well keep in mind that the GPU memory is also mapped into 32bit address space. Meaning if your game uses 1G video memory it looses 1G of system memory. For Skyrim this means 4G - 1G = 3G remaining memory.

 

Here are two example screens of Process Explorer: