Character Skin Glitching

[Radioactivelad]

I've recently started encountering this corruption on NPC faces. It flashes for just the shortest of time, but it's very noticable when it happens.

http://i.imgur.com/kQKVcgA.jpg

 

I'm really not wanting to believe that it's caused by faulty hardware (I built this pc I'm using now less than a year ago) but seeing as I haven't encountered anything like this in over 624 hours in new vegas, I'm really at a loss.

 

Some key notes:

 

-The only thing I've done recently that I could imagine would affect npc skin was that I tried out Fallout Character Overhaul a couple days ago. I didn't like it, so I immediately uninstalled it. (I never saved my game with it active either.)

 

-Once or twice I actually have seen a similar issue, not on an NPCs face, but on a building, where a couple arbitrary spots on a building turned a distinct yellow color in sharp irregular shapes, similar to the ones on the npc. This occurred *before* I tried out FCO.

 

-I haven't seen any geometry stretching or any other things I would typically associate with damaged VRAM.

 

-I haven't (yet) seen anything like this in any other game, including Fallout 4.

 

-Performance in the game doesn't skip or hang when the corruption appears.

 

So, any ideas?

Edited April 14, 2016 by Radioactivelad

[dubiousintent]

How many mods do you have active? These sound like the symptoms of a game that is pushing the "mod cap", which is roughly 140 "active" ESMs and ESPs in FNV. (Don't count mods that are "deactivated" by the Wrye Flash "Bashed Patch".) Note that the cap is not a hard and fast limit. It varies by system, and people are cautioned anytime they go over 130.

 

-Dubious-

[Radioactivelad]

26 mods. The first 11 are official content. The rest are all tried and true mods as well, like the config menu and Ihud.

 

Unfortunately I dug up my old GPU and using it, seems the issue *does not* occur, so it definitely seems to be a hardware issue.

 

But even that seems odd seeing as how these seem to be the only artifacting I'm getting. I haven't seen any stretching geometry or any of the other stuff I normally associate with faulty graphics cards.

Edited April 15, 2016 by Radioactivelad

[dubiousintent]

Puzzling. Suggest you look into the shader capability differences between the two GPUs then. I notice that the "discolored" areas in your image are the areas where the military applies dark facial camouflage to reduce reflection, which suggests "shaders". So possibly you need a tweak to hardware settings. If your old GPC only supports Shader 2.0, then your newer one may need Shader 3.0 for an example. "TweakGuides" may be of some general help in this regard.

 

It is also possible (don't know) that FCO replaced one or more Shaders which may not have been restored to vanilla when you uninstalled it.

 

You might want to take a look at the "Troubleshooting" section of TESTG for common graphic issues, though this particular one doesn't seem to be there (at the moment). Something there may "ring a bell".

 

-Dubious-

Edited April 16, 2016 by dubiousintent

[Radioactivelad]

Yeah, my older card is a 680, so I doubt it's anything like that.

I also reinstalled the game completely so it couldn't be a missing vanilla file or anything.

 

Only (desirable) guess at this point is it's a DX9 issue with newer Nvidia Cards and Windows 10. (There was a windows update recently)

 

 

 

What I have learned though is I won't be buying EVGA cards anymore. My older one was MSI and it went through figurative hell (A garage in Florida Summer) and still seems to work mostly fine wheras this 980 seems to have developed issues in just under a year in an air-conditioned apartment.

 

Guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and start saving up for a new card.

Edited April 16, 2016 by Radioactivelad

[dubiousintent]

nVidia is known to sometimes drop support/features for some older games in later drivers. So if your video driver has updated recently you might want to try an older one. (For this reason I no longer update video drivers unless I have a specific reason to do so. Which means you need to review the change logs before installing.)

 

Just a reminder: when you reinstall the game, you need to rename or delete the "C:\Users\<YourAccountName>\Documents\My Games\FalloutNV" folder INI files. Otherwise any settings in them that are causing issues will remain.

 

-Dubious-