Mesh Corruption?

[Xiavn]

A few weeks ago I played a bit of Skyrim on a new graphics card. About an hour and a half in, I ran into a specific fence in Whiterun (residence district, nearby the battleborn house) that had spiking polygons - trailing far into the ground and into the distance, while also being colored an unusual white. In response to this, I turned the graphics quality down from Ultra to High. Reloaded, no problem.

 

After another hour or so playing a later session, I returned to Whiterun to see if the problem would persist. It did, in fact. I thought to take a screenshot of this one - the polygon deformation was still there, but the texture seemed to be proper.

http://i.imgur.com/OU1hHhc.png

Still no major problem, and I didn't enter the residential lot of Whiterun that often anyways.

Just today I decided to check in again, this time only about a half hour into play. The deformation was there. Again decided to ignore it, headed into the keep to enchant items, and exited. I was greeted with this:

http://i.imgur.com/sRxfrtv.png

I had to pause the game in this instance, because those big polygons wouldn't stop rapidly flashing in and out of visibility. Now, I have just reloaded the autosave laid down in Whiterun after restarting the game. No crazy polygon problems that time, so this is definitely something that racks up as I extend playtime.

 

I saw someone get a very similar problem, which points to the issue either being GPU overloading or this 'Mesh Corruption Bug'.

 

The former I'm ruling out - CPUID was running in the background while I was playing, and the hottest any component had got was 62 degrees on my Graphics Card (and even then, this was an aggregate of its whole running time while booted. More often it was running around 58 degrees.) In simple terms, nothing on my computer was running hotter than normal while playing Skyrim.

 

The latter is a problem that's seemingly described in very vague terms from what I've searched. Any information on how I can fix this? Here's some simple system specs:

• OS - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
• CPU - Intel Core i7 920: 2.67 GhZ
• RAM - 8.00GB Triple-Channel DDR3 @ 531MHz (7-7-7-20)
• Motherboard - Dell Inc. 0R849J (CPU 1)
• GPU - 2048MB ATI AMD Radeon R7 200 Series (Sapphire/PCPartner) - 1600x900 resolution, running 13.12 WHQL drivers.

Other information can be offered up if needed. Few other notes, though:

• The glitch seems to occur only in this specific location. Nowhere else in the game did I seemingly run into anything that looked like this. There were some areas that had some minor other graphical hiccups (z-fighting, weird transparency things), but most of this was stuff that seemingly happens in other games or is simply due to drivers or something. The strange fence deformation, as I previously established, was really specific to this one area of Whiterun.
• While the glitch's location is fairly consistent, when it seems to happen isn't. I believe it might be accelerated by travelling long distances in open-world, though, and it definitely seems pretty strongly tied to how the card's handling VRAM - the card I'm using only has a 128-bit memory bus, which seems smaller than normal. However this might've been the case that I simply missed where the deformation happened in one instance, as the exact location and way the fence deforms isn't consistent.
• I never ran into any problem like this prior to changing graphics cards. The old graphics card I used was an ATI AMD Radeon HD 4850 - ran really freaking hot and had barely any VRAM, but never got hung up on any strange graphical things.

If it helps, here's the mods I'm using. Not listed in any particular order. Also, these mods were sorted out by a combination of using BOSS and through consultation of read-mes of the unofficial patches:

• Unofficial Patches for everything (Skyrim itself, Dawnguard, and the HD textures.)
• RaceCompatability
• Skyrim Community Uncapper
• SPERG
• SPIKE
• USKP Patcher for RaceCompatability
• SkyUI
• Immersive Armors
• Immersive Weapons
• High Res Face Maps for Men by Geonox
• Enhanced Character Edit

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

Edited December 29, 2013 by Xiavn

[Euenus]

You said you turned graphics from ultra to high. However, you should see if turning off asitropic filtering and anti aliasing works.

[Xiavn]

That might be a good idea - One thing I didn't change when altering graphics settings was the level of Anisotropic Filtering (was left at 16x - Didn't think it'd have big performance implications). Will try it out.

 

I don't know, but I think the issue might run a bit deeper than that? I've done a lot of searching on this issue in Skyrim, and there doesn't seem to be a lot, if any, real documentation of this thing normally happening.

[Xiavn]

Turns out the game was still trying to use my previous graphics card (A Radeon HD 7950 that I had to return due to it being really bugged out). I regenerated my .inis, which corrected that check. I still had my doubts that would do the trick, though, so I also tried to verify the game files through steam.

 

Unfortunately the settings are still mostly the same, 8x filtering, and 8x AA (I think?) and the problem still happens, albeit unreliably whenever I leave and re-enter whiterun. It's very consistently happening to the fence in the back of the Gray-Mane's lawn, just in different sections and different places.

http://i.imgur.com/bNLJY1R.jpg http://i.imgur.com/MpWUhdz.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xfTke1C.jpg http://i.imgur.com/uMMDKEi.jpg http://i.imgur.com/BiNlvUc.jpg

Sometimes I get lucky and it apparently maps a fence vertex to another fence vertex, meaning it's just a cluster of bugged polygons that point to one another inside the corral, in which case it's a problem that you'd probably never see unless you went over to the houses in whiterun. Other times, the front of the fence explodes out in that crazy thing I displayed in the last post.

 

I love it, there's absolutely no one else on the internet that can confirm or suggest what causes this, or even put a name to what you'd call a symptom like this.

Edited January 11, 2014 by Xiavn

[Shaeam]

I, too, am getting the same exact problem as this (Minus the crazy laser-light show you had when you paused the game on your first topic). I cannot confirm what's causing the issue -- I can however, link it directly too the fence. I've got a level 56 ('mostly' legit, with some quality of life enhancements such as respecialization mods and uncapper tweaks.) with about 60 to 80 hours of playtime. I've explored most of the world around Whiterun and from what i've noticed the only offending mesh IS the whiterun residental district fences. I considered making a mod to simply remove them from the city -- unfortunately, when I did try that; it would appear that Bethseda combined the fence with the landmesh -- so removing the fence is impossible without creating an entirely new model. I did, however, delete the gates and enable the mod -- although the gates weren't causing the issue...

 

Considering it's happening nowhere else for me -- I highly suspect that it's simply a mesh problem. My graphics card hasn't really showed any signs of acting up on any other game. Perhaps it's a mod that we both have installed glitching up the meshes? I initally assumed the problem stimmed from S.W.I.M due to it's mesh revamps -- although after uninstalling S.W.I.M the problem persists. I now assume that it's the unofficial high resolution texture pack patch.

 

Anyway... I am going to be uninstalling unofficial high resolution texture pack patch and i'll be back with my results -- I do genuinely hope this post isn't dead, since i'm hoping we can find a fix for this rather irritating but not game breaking issue.

 

 

Edit: After further testing with the Unofficial High Res Patch uninstalled -- that was definitely not the culprit.

Edited January 17, 2014 by Shaeam

[samuraishi]

Hi guys I had this problem and thought it was something I had changed in either my skyrim ini files or my graphics card settings to accomodate ENB settings, however after a day of frustration I went pure vanilla (except for the DLC files) and narrowed the culprit of this to one of the unoffical bug patches, I'm guessing skyrim or hearthfire but it could be any of the 4 content based bug fixes (didnt show up when i had the HD textures + the patch for that), put my other mods back on and the problem hasnt shown up again.

[mstersierra]

Did you overclock your graphics card? i had this problem too when i overlocked my graphic cards, and when i took it back to normal clock, meshes were back to normal again.

Edited January 16, 2016 by mstersierra

[nikolumbus]

I'm getting this issue in the same area, even though it was apparently fixed by USLEEP patch V 3.0.0.

It varies in intensity. I've had it quite bad and very noticeable, though not as bad as some of those screenshots, but usually it's quite minor - just a small part of the fence at the points closest to the walls.

 

It also seems to be tied to this file from SMIM V 1.89 =

 

textures/smim/architecture/whiterun/wrstockade_properwood.dds

Edited January 30, 2016 by nikolumbus

[charliebrown032]

2017 usleep 3.0.9 and still happening. Doesn't seem to be my GPU since it only happens there, the corral in House of Gray Mane

Edited June 27, 2017 by charliebrown032

[skannerz22]

download cleanmem

here is a tutorial

it's a VERY EASY program

 

 

 

also try turning vsync on it's to stop these screan tearing things as well

Edited July 1, 2017 by skannerz22