Random 4 second freeze fixed, but not Complete Freeze. Anyone find a s

[zerther]

At first I dealt with the random 4 second freeze outdoors. These mods helped incase it's happening to you

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2531

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5458

Thanks for the fix guys.

 

But every so often I get a complete freeze, where I either have to restart my computer, or alt+tab and close the program. I dont get a black or blue screen. the game just freezes. I have yet to find any word on a fix for this mostly because searches will always point to the more frequent 4 second freeze. Sometimes I can play for hours without seeing the freeze, and sometimes it happens minutes after I load up a game. If anyone has any info, it would be awesome.

 

I also updated my nvidia card to the driver thats specifically meant to run skyrim... I'm running windows xp.

Edited January 17, 2012 by zerther

[Tefnacht]

Hi.

 

I have no idea if this will be of any help to you but since no one else seems to have any advice on the subject ... let me tell you my little story of the game completely freezing up at random and how I solved it.

 

First: I am using the ENB patch as well because without it most fire and magic effects, as well as spider webs, are invisible in my game. My graphics card is a rather outdated nVidia 7950 GT. Don't laugh :) It only has 512Mb of video memory and this was part of my problem.

 

I had installed a nude male body mod that included ridiculously large textures without really noticing the size. A generic 80Mb body texture paired with 21Mb normal maps for each race. My game only froze up while I was traveling outdoors. At first it seemed to be random but then I noticed it happened at places where random encounters are triggered, close to bandit camps and sometimes close to cities.

 

So I figured it had something to do with actors and started investigating. More or less by accident I noticed those super large body texture files. After I removed the mod the game stopped freezing up on me.

Since then I have reinstalled the mod but downsized the textures and saved them in a “better” DDS format, to keep their file size in line with the vanilla sizes. 2,7Mb instead of 80Mb. Now it all works like a charm.

 

This may or may not help you. If you are using mods including textures, check the file size of the replacement textures. From my experience I think the game might have trouble juggling textures in and out of video memory, sometimes running into an endless loop of loading/unloading if all the textures really needed at once to render a frame exceed the available VRAM. I might be a “special” case though, since my graphics board is so old and I am using the rather new 290.36 drivers.

 

If you're not using mods like that ... I have no idea.

 

Good luck.

 

PS: To monitor your VRAM use in real time there is a nifty, slender little freeware tool called MemStatus. Its fun to watch the game chew up and release video memory as you walk through the world.