Skyrim CTD after new AMD Patch

[Tallcastle]

EDIT - See Next Two Posts For Better Fixes For This Problem - EDIT

 

I dived into Skyrim after updating my AMD driver to 11.9 today, and encountered a irritating CTD problem during the "House of Horrors" quest

 

The specific event listed here for those of you that don't want it to be ruined for you

 

after you and the vigilant of stendarr get locked in the abandoned house in Markarth, between when Molog Bol speaks in your mind wile objects fly around the room - and the part when you are forced to kill Tyranus

 

the Crash was characterized by the game visuals freezing up with the game sounds sometimes (but not always) going on in the background. Sometimes it would recover on its own only to freeze up again. after a minute or so the game would totally shut down with the only error message being a small pop up over the icon tray in the lower right hand corner (windows 7) indicating

"your AMD driver has stopped responding and has recovered"

I don't know if this is similar to any of the other CTD problems people have been having. But just in case others have been having this problem, I figured i would list my findings here.

 

**FIX**

fiddled around with all my settings and tracked the problem to my AMD Graphics Card.

when i updated to 11.9 the patch changed some of my system settings.

go to your "AMD VISION Engine Control Center" program (most AMD Users will have this program running in the background)

go to the "Performance" tab

select "AMD Overdrive" from the drop down menu

UNCHECK [Enable AMD Overdrive] - that's right, turn it off if you have it on that's whats causing it.

 

most of the problems i have had with the game corrected themselves after turning this feature off.

i hope this helps some people.

Edited November 22, 2011 by Tallcastle

[Arthmoor]

Or you could just update to the 11.10 drivers which solved the soft-freeze. There should be no need to mess with the Overdrive controls. It's enabled on mine, and yes, I had two of those soft-freezes that behaved like AMD driver crashes. Neither of them dropped to desktop and the problem went away after the driver update.

[Tallcastle]

Since i was feeling somewhat sheepish after Arthmoor pointed out the dated nature of my fix i did some research into his suggestion and discovered that 11.9 is indeed an old update, and that 11.10 would fix the problem.

 

However i ALSO discovered that there is an 11.11a update released the 21st. This update includes fixes that will...

1. Improve performance 2-7% on single GPU configurations

2. Resolve corruption seen when enabling Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing on the AMD Radeon HD 6970 Series

3. Disable CrossFireX (to resolve negative scaling and image quality issues seen when CrossFireX is enabled)

- They are working on a fix for the CrossFireX problem and will make it available ASAP

 

These fixes where specifically for Skyrim!

 

Check HERE for the official AMD web sight (lists changes and gives links for the download)

 

NOTE: I don't know about you guys but my AMD Catalyst Auto Update would not grab this file on its own. I had to download and install it myself.

[Dan3345]

Since i was feeling somewhat sheepish after Arthmoor pointed out the dated nature of my fix i did some research into his suggestion and discovered that 11.9 is indeed an old update, and that 11.10 would fix the problem.

 

However i ALSO discovered that there is an 11.11a update released the 21st. This update includes fixes that will...

1. Improve performance 2-7% on single GPU configurations

2. Resolve corruption seen when enabling Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing on the AMD Radeon HD 6970 Series

3. Disable CrossFireX (to resolve negative scaling and image quality issues seen when CrossFireX is enabled)

- They are working on a fix for the CrossFireX problem and will make it available ASAP

 

These fixes where specifically for Skyrim!

 

Check HERE for the official AMD web sight (lists changes and gives links for the download)

 

NOTE: I don't know about you guys but my AMD Catalyst Auto Update would not grab this file on its own. I had to download and install it myself.

 

 

+1 kudos to you my good man!! I have been looking for this update for a while now! The reason catalyst won't fetch for you I believe is because the driver is a beta, and specifically designed for a few games. Anyways thanks!