Good PC but still crashing, help please

[Murielkai]

Hey guys, I've been modding Oblivion for years, all Bethesda games for that matter, and I recently purchased an Alienware M17 and thought id mod one more game just to see how the PC handles it. I have a 4.0 gh processer, windows 7 ultimate, 32 gb RAM, nvidia 780M graphics card with 4 gb VRAM.

 

I am getting random crashes and I really do not think its my load order or any particular mod conflict but I am using some graphical enhancements I have never used before. I am basically running the game as maxed out as I can right now with Qarls HD texture pack, RAEVWD (with the QTP3 textures installed and ugriddistantcount set to 20), All Natural Weather, HD trees (forget the name exactly) set to 125% size, and I am running godrays and cellshader + AA. For the most part I get 30 FPS nearly everywhere except near really intense areas like the waterfront in the IC (using better cities also). The crashing is... bearable, but in the past my games hardly EVER crashed, period.

 

The crashing happens mainly during zoning/loading a new zone but every now and then when I close a menu or equip an item.

 

I have dome all the ini tweaks, set the exe to large address aware, and I am running streamline and PCB.

 

I currently have these set to...

 

uInterior Cell Buffer=16

uExterior Cell Buffer=102

iPreloadSizeLimit=104857600

 

...for 2gb of RAM but it says you can go higher. Would going higher help perhaps? And if so, what would I set the int/ext cell buffer to for 4bg of RAM?

 

Below is my load order, any advice would be GREATLY appreciated, thank you. And please let me know if crashes just simply CANNOT be helped when running a game maxed out like this. Perhaps the game engine just can't handle it? I would prefer to have my game as crash free as possible, heh.

 

Oblivion.esm
All Natural Base.esm
Cobl Main.esm
Better Cities Resources.esm
CM Partners.esm
Unofficial Oblivion Patch.esp
UOPS Additional Changes.esp
DLCShiveringIsles.esp
Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch.esp
Better Cities .esp
Natural_Habitat_by_Max_Tael.esp
All Natural.esp
All Natural - SI.esp
Natural_Water_by_Max_Tael.esp
All Natural - Real Lights.esp
WindowLightingSystem.esp
Book Jackets Oblivion.esp
ClocksOfCyrodiil_BC_OBC_OC_OCLR_Vanilla.esp
ImprovedSigns.esp
Luchaire's Neck Seam Concealer.esp
RAEVWD New Sheoth.esp
Xia_Nhary_TwilightAssassin.HGEC1.1Normal.esp
Oblivion Graphics Extender Support.esp
Purge Cell Buffers - Cell Change.esp
Purge Cell Buffers - Loading.esp
Spell Delete And Item Remove.esp
Streamline 3.1.esp
DLCHorseArmor.esp
DLCHorseArmor - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCOrrery.esp
DLCOrrery - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCVileLair.esp
DLCVileLair - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCMehrunesRazor.esp
DLCMehrunesRazor - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCSpellTomes.esp
EVE_StockEquipmentReplacer.esp
1SB_RavenousEleganceOutfit.esp
AoC Armoury of Conan.esp
Captain_Molly_HGEC.esp
Chapel Shop.esp
GhostArmor.esp
HentaiSchoolGirlCollection.esp
IvyArmor_Full.esp
New Frostmourne Sword by Jojjo v1_0.esp
Shdw_Armor Set_Sotonhorian.esp
ShaiyaOutfit.esp
Conan Swords - Atlantean 2Hand Fur Scabbard.esp
Conan Swords - Atlantean 2Hand Leather Scabbard.esp
Conan Swords - Atlantean 2Hand No Scabbard.esp
Conan Swords - Atlantean Fur Scabbard.esp
Conan Swords - Atlantean Leather Scabbard.esp
Conan Swords - Atlantean No Scabbard.esp
Dynasty Recolor.esp
Thunderbird Armor.esp
Underworld Armor.esp
DLCThievesDen.esp
DLCThievesDen - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCThievesDen - Unofficial Patch - SSSB.esp
Cobl Glue.esp
Cobl Si.esp
GlenvarCastle.esp
Theryon.esp
Tona's_ModsStore.esp
VaultsofCyrodiil.esp
VaultsofCyrodiilBC.esp
Apachii_Goddess_Store.esp
DLCBattlehornCastle.esp
DLCBattlehornCastle - Unofficial Patch.esp
DLCfrostcrag.esp
FrostcragRebornCobl.esp
Knights.esp
Knights - Unofficial Patch.esp
EVE_KnightsoftheNine.esp
EVE_ShiveringIslesEasterEggs.esp
Enhanced Vegetation [125%].esp
SetEssentialActors.esp
MidasSpells.esp
_Ren_BeautyPack_onlyhairs.esp
CM Partners.esp
Moonshadow Elves - Sc.esp
CuteElf11.esp
X.Races.Comp.esp
CM Partners NPC.esp
CM Partners Extra NPCs.esp
DAValeriaCuteElf.esp
Oblivion_Character_Overhaul.esp
Better Cities Full.esp
Better Imperial City.esp
Better Cities - All Natural.esp
Better Imperial City FPS Patch.esp
Better Cities - No LEYAWIIN Flooding.esp
Bashed Patch, 0.esp

 

Edit: Could PCB be causing my crashing? Just curious.

Edited April 11, 2014 by Murielkai

[discovery1]

Hi, did you do a complete reinstall on this machine, reason i ask is you cant really swap the oblivion ini from one pc to another without problems, you have a lot of enhancement mods, if you have a 64 bit machine i would be inclined to install the 4gb patch from nt core web sit and run the oblivion stutter reducer with the heap setting at about 500 or upwards, i use 1000. the issue you get with oblivion is the fact it will crash when the vram exceeds 1.8 gig, but you get round this by patching the oblivion.exe file. ( not the obse.exe file). Works for me, imwas getting crashes during fast travel and opening doors. I would be interested to know exactly when your game crashes.

[discovery1]

Ps, you do not need streamline and the two cell purge esps at the same time. If your pc is as good as the spec suggests you really do not need streamline, get rid of it and the two other purge esps and use memory purger extended which is a newish mod on this site.

The spell delete and item remover i have not seen before and i am wondering if this could possibly corrupt your saves. Maybe someone else will know the answer to that

Good luck.

[sendal]

Can you provide more inf about crashes? How it happening? You said it happens during zones loading mostly, but what kind of crash is it? What your operating system telling you? What kind of error? How looks visual part of crash, for example "During loading area/objects/meshes the screen becomming black for a second and the game just closing without any promts like it was just stopped in the processes"... Or does it providing any crash information ?

As far as i know there are bunch of problems and issues with Alienware Notebooks especially m15x & m17 which taking parts in graphical/3d work and games. Also i should say that almost all of Alienware products are strongly Overpriced.

Also its just my opinion but doesn't Oblivion Unofficial Patch should go after better cities since its mostly fixing some bind meshes and textures? Same as RAEVWD...

Also had you tryed to set Preload Size limit to lower numbers? mine usually is much lower then 50.000.000. My PC is kinda older technologically and based on Core Quad CPU, I got 8gb ram with cut FQ to 1066 instead of 1333, Radeon 5850. If not talking about out different GPUs, then our perfomance is about to be similar. So i dont think you need to set big preload number if your crashes happening right during loading screens and black screens changing zones, but if it happens when preload is over and you already see some parts of game world and have just minor freezing that means that system continue to load and then it can be: Some wrong order of mods of mesh collisions conflicts. Your GPU can't handle the colisions. As far as i know as i was reinstalling game over & over again b'cause of mods like Better Cities there are a lot of problems with spliting those mods in the right way & some times even need to manually edit/delete/replace some meshes to make everything to work fine. As far as i see you have moderate number of mods with World Mesh changing... for my opinion you should move all Better Cities, Cobl , Knights and mods of that kind infront of loading order for example to set Knights before Unofficial Shivering patch and some kind of other things. Check this http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Load_order_recommendations. if you had not check it already. only thing i think is wrong there is that USIP should goes only after Knights.

But its just mine experiance.

Also what texture resolution size, LODs, shadows and parameters of that kind you have set in your ini ?

You said that other games/3ds hardly crashed ever, but that means that they had crashes? Same with it> you sould provide more inf.

Sry for my bad english.

[Murielkai]

@discovery1

 

Yes I did a complete reinstall from the ground up. I install the game, patch it, install my "essentials" (OBMM, OBSE, BOSS, Wrye Bash, Unofficial Oblivon Patches, 4 GB enabler from the Nexus site, etc) then zip it up to make a base backup. Each time I make changes I just delete the game and rebuild it so I know for sure what exactly is going on and elliminate extraneous variables. I usually start a new save game with each rebuild to play test.

 

How do you chnage the heap setting for Oblivion Stutter Reducer (I have it installed btw)? Is there an ini for it somewhere?

 

As far as the spell delete and item remover mod goes, all I know is that I have always used in past Oblivion installs and never had a problem... however, although I have always installed it, I have never actually tried to use it in game. Lol. Maybe I will remove it, since I don't use it anyway.

 

I am checking out the memory purger extended. I am just curious but are my uinterior/exterior and ipreload settings I mentioned above alright? Or can they go higher? I had them set to those numbers (the tweak guide said those settings where for 2 GBs of RAM) on my old Voodoo Firebird that had only 4 GBs of ram and never had a problem on that machine.

 

I used the 4GB enabler from the nexus site, is that the one you are talking about that is from the "core site"?

 

The game crashes most often when zoning (opening doors) and it seems to be fairly sporatic. There are purely random crashes also however, just walking around in the country side or when managing my inventory or equiping an item (no item in particular, just random items). To elaborate, when I click on a door to zone it sometimes crashes right away before the loading screen and sometimes just after the loading screen but I never actually see the zone load, it just goes black and I get the default windows message saying "this program has stopped functioning properly".

 

 

@sendal

 

Windows isn't telling me anything useful, it just says what I wrote above, that "this program has stopped working properly". The game closes pretty much as it would when you stop a process. Its there one second and gone the next, very fast CTD.

 

And yes Alienware has had some issues with freezing and hanging, mainly due to nvidia driver issues and hte I7 processor relocating resources in strange ways, usually during auto updates. I have bonded with this PC and it tells me what it needs. We are friends now so those issues are under control. I have set Oblivion to "max performance" in the nvidia control panel however, just to be safe.

 

As far as preloadsizelimit, I do not fully understand what this does, I only use the "recomended" settings in the tweak guides. The game is crashing fairly randomly right now and also when I am just walking around outdoors. I will look into the load order for RAEVWD and Unofficial Oblivion Patch, right now I just have it set where BOSS places them. But what you are saying about meshes loading seems like a possible culprit, since I do have several graphical enhancements running. I will look into those also.

 

I am using a new version of Better Cities. I was using the older version with the hotfix patch and now im using 5.4 I think (latest). So that might be an issue perhaps but unlikely I think.

 

"Also what texture resolution size, LODs, shadows and parameters of that kind you have set in your ini ?"

 

All at max settings, with max FPS in most areas and a little stuttering here and there.

 

"You said that other games/3ds hardly crashed ever, but that means that they had crashes? Same with it> you sould provide more inf."

 

When I said other games I meant my past Oblivion games on other PC's. I have hardly ever had crashing in any of my modded Oblivion and Fallout games, well fallout had some ussues here and there with the PCB when moving from exterior to interior zones. I have used many of the same mods on this install of Oblivion that I have in the past so I would have thought crashes would be minimal, the only difference is really just the extra HD textures, and mesh overhauls like RAEVWD and so on. I could not run those on my old PC.

[discovery1]

OSR ini is in obse plugins.

breplace heap=1

then set heap amount in heap settings.

 

some of you crashes could be corrupted spawns, try this

 

open console

type...coc center

wait for 4 days and nights

savegame

type...saveini

 

use map to get back to where you were previously.

[Murielkai]

Hmm I think maybe the stutter remover setting and the memory purger may have done the trick, I am still playtesting but only had one crash in about 3 hours. That is acceptable. I hope it stays that way. (crosses fingers)

[Murielkai]

Aside from the changes in the above post I changed these settings also:

 

bUseHardDriveCache=1
uInterior Cell Buffer=24
uExterior Cell Buffer=288
iPreloadSizeLimit=262144000

 

So far there is no crashing and nearly no stutter whatsoever. It runs at max FPS except for a few locations where there are a lot of bridges and castles, it drops to 25 FPS (RAEVWD HD bridges and castles slows it down a bit). I guess I can't complain, this is as maxed out as an Oblivion game can get. I kept streamline just for the purge before save feature but got rid of the PCB - Purge every cell .esp.