Skyrim systemic degeneration - looking for any possible suggestions

[Alendi]

I'm having random CTDs, but I'm uncertain as to whether or not they're related to my system resources or hardware. Let me explain.

 

When I installed the game, the only real hurdle I had to overcome was the audio issue, which was fine. The game ran amazingly on my rig, with only rare crashes that would vary in their frequency. I was ok with this; I learned to save often and lost little time at all.

 

Strangely, the game seemed seemed to change over time; the first I noticed of its instability was being unable to exit Jorvaskr in Whiterun. I shrugged it off, only because I had completed all of their quests and wasn't bothered by not being able to do any more random infinity quests. But the game started to get worse: certain locations revisited would crash in the same way upon entering; finally, it got to the point where I could no longer play for five minutes in ANY location without the game crashing to desktop.

 

None of my system settings have changed. I've tried all versions of the game. My drivers are up to date; I'm running a stripped down Windows 7 64, with bare minimal processes, just like before. Skyrim is the only game that has developed this sort of 'systemic' degeneration. It's really weird. My theory is that it's a save file issue. I don't know how the game works, but my character is level 69 and I have a TON of save files--2.56GB worth.

 

Starting the game anew by removing my save files changes everything--I can play the game like I used to. Also, the quicksave feature performs much faster now that all the other files are gone. Conversely, when I remove ALL the save files and load the latest of my original character, the game goes back to crashing. SOOOO: the save files can essentially 'write in' a glitch where CTDs start to occurs. This is the real problem behind the CTD I think. Is there anyway to modify a save file so it doesn't cause crashes?

 

They really need to fix this cumulative effect with save files. I'd really like to tie up the few loose ends I had with my initial character rather than start all over. I pretty much finished the game in terms of quests and exploration. Hopefully, they'll figure out that it's the save files likely crashing a lot of people to their desktop. Any thoughts on this folks?

 

Cheers,

 

_E

[piotr0r]

I encountered the same kind of problems (performance degradation over time), and came to a point where the game was unplayable. I had systematic crashes to desktop at Katla's Farm, and was about to stop playing.

 

Then I don't remember where I saw this hint, but someone suggested to use the pcb console command - purge cell buffer. Just type pcb perdiodically while you're outdoors, and when the command actually purges something, you should see a bunch of messages appearing in the console. Then dismiss the console, and proceed.

 

It's not actually a silver bullet, but it has made my gaming experience considerably better, since it seems to purge the problematic areas of their toxic contents, because the game doesn't crash as often. Several caveats :

 

- I have to spam the command repeatedly (and I do mean it) in exterior, so that the game doesn't CTD ;

- I doesn't prevent the game from crashing during load times - symptoms : both GPU and CPU charge drop to zero (instead of around 35 % on my GTX 260. So you have to make a LOT of saves, because once your save is 'poisoned' by crashing the game, I noticed that it won't even load afterwards and you remain basically screwed.

- It doesn't prevent the game from crashing because ... well, because it just wanted to crash.

 

Typically, I type PCB every 2 or 3 minutes while outside. I know it's not very practical, but since I'm doing this, i've been able to go forward. So, I'm not at all pretending it will magically solve your problems, but since I'm quite confident that most of the CTDs out there are issues within the game itself, and not the rigs, you should definitely try to give it a go.

 

Also, I came to the point where I completely disabled all kinds of Aero effects and desktop compositing when playing Skyrim, reverting to the old Windows 2000 style. Granted, it's ugly, but I free up to 100 MB of graphics memory on my 260 GTX which has 896. Thanks to a sidebar gadget, i'm able to monitor the GDDR load, and the game still has a few tens of megabytes of free graphics memory while running (custom setting somewhere between high and ultra, at FSAA 4x but ugridstoload at 11!) - which it had no before. And don't forget to close any GPU accelerated web browsers like Chrome and Firefox. I've been able to reduce my graphics memory load to 43 MB (instead of 204 right now) with two screens (1600x1200) and 1900x1200).

Edited December 23, 2011 by piotr0r