fix for skyrim black screen crash

[saamziel]

i have found this fix to work on my system to keep my amd 6870 from crashing to black screen every 30 minutes, it has worked for the last 4 days with no crash what so ever i have played for up to 8 hours each time.

 

 

 

Step one:

 

Boot into safe mode and uninstall your graphics driver and catalyst control center/vision control center (which ever you have)

 

--it seems note worthy to mention that i believe the catalyst control center to be the root of the problem

 

Step Two:

 

reboot into normal mode (your resolution will be mess up this is okay for now) and download driver sweep and use it to remove the rest of the amd driver files

 

Step three:

 

Download the latest video driver, and only the driver without any extra catalyst software. I can not stress enough do not install anything except the bare driver.

 

Step four:

 

Reboot your system again (your resolution should be back to normal now) and download and run msi afterburner

 

Step Five:

 

use msi afterburner to under clock your gpu with 710 mhz core clock, 900 mhz memory clock, and a manual fan speed of 70

 

--I am using these settings right now and am able to run on ultra settings with all the texture mods and i have no lag, frame skipping, fps loss ect. let me know if this works for you

[Tom2681]

I have a 6870 too, and haven't had to do any of that.

How do you set up your graphics without Catalyst? Does MSI afterburner allow you to change anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing and the rest?

 

I do agree with you on the importance of driver sweeping and doing a clean install, but Catalyst sounds indispensable to me.

[Kungfushiver]

Thanks saamziel, this worked perfectly for me!

I've been having the black screen crash every 5-40 min in various places and was beginning to think it was going to be unplayable :wallbash: . I tried so many suggestions and spent probably more time trying to fix the game than actually playing it until I tried your suggestion as almost a last resort. Ive played for about 10 hours in 3 days and not one crash :D

[WhiteFalcon8]

I have a problem i cant run those settings in the msi afterburner, my display crashes at them :/ and i have an GeForce 9600GT

[Shotherra]

I have the same problem as listed, although I`m using a Nvidia card (can`t renember wich one) So I`ll give it a try and se whats happening.

[voldoman]

Your method didn't work for me. I just did a fresh install of Windows for other related reasons last week and only loaded the latest driver, no CCC or any of the other crap. I figured while I had a new install I might as well test Skyrim and it still hard crashed. However, I did just find a new solution that worked for me, I posted this in the big thread as well. I had tried every fix in that thread to no avail, maybe this will work for some.

 

Like a lot of people, I tried every solution listed here and nothing worked. I have plenty of posts itt from way back when lol. Anyway, much to my amazement after nearly a year, I FINALLY FOUND A SOLUTION!!!

 

I bought SR3 during the Steam summer sale and it was doing the same s***, but these are the only two games that crash my system. So I start more hours and hours of research. I still refused to believe it was a hardware problem, and it turns out it is and isn't. Well, it could be either one, but I'm still leaning towards the code in these games or something screwy with the GPU drivers, maybe a combo of both. Either way, here's how I fixed it and have been playing both games without system crashes for 2 days now, before it was 5 minutes or less.

 

It's simple, DISABLE 2D CLOCKS ON YOUR GPU.

 

After all this time it was that easy, and I don't recall ever seeing this solution posted to fix it. For some reason my card was slipping into 2D clock speeds during gameplay which was causing the crashes, as it should at those low speeds trying to handle demanding graphics. So everyone who has lost all hope should give it a whirl, especially if you have a 6870 like me, which seems to still be the biggest offender. If the option isn't there or isn't working in CCC try downloading your card manufacturer's specific GPU tool, which in my case was HIS iTurbo. (Afterburner for MSI, Trixx for Saphire, etc) I never tried in CCC tbqh, but iTurbo does the trick for me.

 

I hope this works for some desperate folks out there, good luck!

 

Edit: Just a small warning, disabling your 2D clocks will make your GPU idle at higher temps. Make sure you have good cooling.

[DanielLutnick]

I feel it might be useful to give my opinion and an account of my experience with this issue as I HAVE FIXED it using Saamziel's method. I searched for DAYS to find out why I was getting such a gnarly crash. I have modded Fallout: New Vegas extensively and never had it ever given me a crash quite this bad. Especially for game this late past the release date. (I just purchased the legendary edition)

 

First my relevant computer specs are as follows:

Intel board and chipset. DX58SO black edition with a 3.2ghz i7 chip

6gb of DDR3 1600 G.skill ram

Sapphire Radeon 5850HD GPU

 

I opened the windows CPU meter and speccy and ran skyrim in a window to watch the GPU, nothing got extraordinarily hot, my CPU was at 22% load and my RAM at 48% and then BAM! It locked up. I should note that this doesn't happen with Assassins Creed, BF3, Duke4, New Vegas, or Hitman: Absolution. So then I found this thread and tried it.

 

Putting Sapphire TrixX on my computer with basic drivers doesn't solve it completely, I had to underclock as well, but the default for my GPU Clock was "725" and the Memory Clock was "4000" and after playing with it a little I got it run perfectly stable at a Memory clock of "3500" and left the GPU Clock alone. I also applied a custom fan setting to allow the fan to run at 75% when it got to 70 degrees. Up from 40% of total fan speed at 30 degrees.

 

That led to a new problem. It works but with TrixX and reportedly with MSI afterburner as well (I need verification), you will develop a screen flicker. How annoying right? And here is the janky fix in all this. Once you set your GPU up with Afterburner or TrixX you have to change your resolution and then change it back and the flicker disappears. It's a problem with windows as far as my research led, and some people used task schedulers and what not to set it all to work however, by this point my patience was waning and I just wanted to play the damn game.

 

I am not (and never have been a fan of ATI's Catalyst Control Center) but I'm not entirely sure it's a problem with it completely. That being said I'm sure as shoot not going to put it back on my computer.

 

I hope this elaboration helps someone and Thanks to Saamziel for posting this in the first place.

 

TL;DR: Remove your drivers, wipe all the residual files and CCC off your computer, get your board makers overclocking utility (Mine is TrixX), install just the basic drivers ONLY, install the overclocking utility, Underclock your "Memory Clock" option a small amount (this won't hurt performance), set your GPU fan to run at a higher speed under load or all the time (your choice), set your resolution to something else, change it back to the resolution you want, play Skyrim crash free.

[Keratul]

Well I just wanted to write this as a thanks to both saamziel and DanielLutnick.

I've been having this issue for waaay to long until I finally decided to try this out.

Daniel I do have almost the same hardware you do including the HD5850 and after doing exactly the same of what you did Skyrim now runs crash free (at least free of the black screen lockdown). I got that same screen flicker you mentioned but I only see it on my 2nd screen and no matter wht I do it just wont go away but it aint that bad. At least I finally get to play this thanks to both of you again!!

Edit: flicker went away after I after I disconnected 2nd screen and setup my TV as second screen then reverting change. Now everything works =D

Edited September 22, 2013 by Keratul

[hadarsal]

can you please post a one by one step instructions for newbs like me? i just realy wanna play this game