I'm at wit's end: Catastrophic crashing

[RedVexHK]

I had the same glitch with another game on an older PC .. turned out to have nothing to do with the graphics in my case as it told me what went wrong.. I had a soundcard that was bad... and every time it was overtaxed it would cause a similar issue to yours.. graphics went weird and audio would crash... it was all related to the sound card crashing.

[cmkennedy]

I had the same glitch with another game on an older PC .. turned out to have nothing to do with the graphics in my case as it told me what went wrong.. I had a soundcard that was bad... and every time it was overtaxed it would cause a similar issue to yours.. graphics went weird and audio would crash... it was all related to the sound card crashing.

That was my thought, but it's odd that it doesn't crash when the graphics are set very low. I didn't touch the audio settings, not that there's much there that would help.

[Striker879]

A couple of things (and you have probably already covered them). With plenty of cooling intake a case can get loaded up with dust (unless your fans are filtered of course ... then the filters need regular cleaning). I use Speedfan for my case fan and CPU fan speed control and MSI Afterburner for GPU fan speed control myself. Each have a temperature chart you can use to monitor peak temperatures during a game test run.

 

Have you tried disabling sound (especially music) in your Oblivion.ini? If your problem is sound based that may help prove or disprove the theory. Here's a link to the appropriate section in Koroush Ghazi's Oblivion Tweak Guide (scroll down to the Audio section in the first link ... the second is for the first page of the guide).

[cmkennedy]

A couple of things (and you have probably already covered them). With plenty of cooling intake a case can get loaded up with dust (unless your fans are filtered of course ... then the filters need regular cleaning). I use Speedfan for my case fan and CPU fan speed control and MSI Afterburner for GPU fan speed control myself. Each have a temperature chart you can use to monitor peak temperatures during a game test run.

 

Have you tried disabling sound (especially music) in your Oblivion.ini? If your problem is sound based that may help prove or disprove the theory. Here's a link to the appropriate section in Koroush Ghazi's Oblivion Tweak Guide (scroll down to the Audio section in the first link ... the second is for the first page of the guide).

When I replaced the video card about three weeks ago I made sure to vacuum out the case and the fan filters. It wasn't bad at all, considering we have a dog and three cats.

 

As for the sound settings: I had my hopes up for this, and I don't really know why. Set the graphics back up to the normal level (full resolution, 4x anti aliasing, max view distance on all but grass), turned off HW sound acceleration:

 

bDSoundHWAcceleration=0

Still crashed. Made two additional changes:

 

bMusicEnabled=0
bSoundEnabled=0

Crashed again. I guess if it is sound-related, these settings aren't helping the situation any.

[Striker879]

I would think that those results point to sound related issues not being the problem. Have you tried letting the game rebuild your Oblivion.ini file? If you rename the file Oblivion.ini to Oblivionini.old (it should be located in Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents\My Games\Oblivion, at least that's where it is for 32 bit Win XP ... NOT the file Oblivion_default.ini located in your game's Oblivion directory) and then start the game as far as the main menu. Exit the game and it will rebuild Oblivion.ini using the Oblivion_default.ini as a base and re-detect your hardware. The game is old, so most modern hardware isn't detected correctly especially in the video card department, so you may need to change your video settings back to what you prefer afterwards. If rebuilding the ini doesn't help you can delete the rebuilt one and rename your original back to Oblivion.ini.

 

Another thing is to make sure you have antialiasing disabled in the NVIDIA Control Panel while working through this issue, and I'd make sure that HDR and Bloom are disabled in the in-game video menu as well (until you get around this issue ... then you can start turning things back on one or two at a time). I use an older version of the NVIDIA drivers (270.61) but I'm pretty sure your newer ones will allow you to just alter the settings for just Oblivion in the 'Manage 3D Settings' 'Programs' tab.

[Raffer]

Not sure how I could go about testing the mainboard. Might need suggestions for that.

 

I do not know of a test so you probably have to rule out all other possibilities, but you can see if it is a heat issue on one of its components. Open your case, take a fan (a spare fan or from the case) and temporarily attach it so that it blows on your mainboard's two heatsinks. This will need some improvised construction but it is just temporary for testing. Be careful that no cables can be stuck in the fan, that its blades cannot hit your hardware and that it cannot move around while running. Cable straps through the screw holes are excellent for this but you can use everything non-metal to fix it in place. Another way would be to place the fan on a box away from the case, secure it and have it blow in the heatsink's direction.

[cmkennedy]

I've tried automatically rebuilding the oblivion.ini file several times to no avail. Here's a bunch of troubleshooting I just performed that didn't help:

 

• Turned off Bloom.
• Reduced view distance to 50%.
• Turned shadow filtering to OFF.
• Turned off multisampling and gamma correction through the NVIDIA control panel.

I just ran a SpeedFan log on the last session I had. Writes temps for GPU, Core 0 and Core 1 every 3 seconds. Here's the last several entries, apologies for length:

 

 

Secs	GPU	Core 0	Core 1
64101	71.0	51.0	51.0
64104	71.0	52.0	51.0
64107	71.0	53.0	51.0
64110	71.0	52.0	51.0
64113	71.0	53.0	51.0
64116	71.0	52.0	51.0
64119	71.0	53.0	51.0
64122	72.0	52.0	51.0
64125	72.0	53.0	51.0
64128	73.0	52.0	51.0
64131	72.0	51.0	51.0
64134	71.0	51.0	51.0
64138	72.0	51.0	51.0
64141	73.0	51.0	51.0
64144	73.0	52.0	52.0
64147	73.0	52.0	52.0
64150	73.0	52.0	51.0
64153	73.0	53.0	51.0
64156	73.0	54.0	51.0
64159	74.0	54.0	52.0
64162	74.0	54.0	52.0
64165	74.0	52.0	52.0
64168	74.0	53.0	51.0
64171	74.0	53.0	52.0
64174	74.0	54.0	52.0
64177	75.0	53.0	52.0
64180	75.0	54.0	52.0
64183	75.0	52.0	52.0
64187	75.0	54.0	51.0
64190	75.0	54.0	52.0
64193	75.0	54.0	52.0
64196	75.0	55.0	52.0
64199	75.0	53.0	52.0
64202	75.0	53.0	52.0

 

Beginning to really think this isn't temp-related. Those temps are well within normal range. I think I'll run another game for a while in a graphics-heavy environment and post that log to see what temps reach.

 

I may completely remove the Realtek drivers and then try. At this point I'm kind of desperately grasping at straws. Nothing makes sense anymore.

Edited February 6, 2012 by cmkennedy

[cmkennedy]

Definitely not temp-related. A log from World of Warcraft, flying through some particle-heavy areas with lots of wandering creatures:

 

 

66444	78.0	56.0	53.0
66448	78.0	55.0	54.0
66451	78.0	54.0	53.0
66454	79.0	55.0	53.0
66457	78.0	55.0	53.0
66460	79.0	55.0	53.0
66463	79.0	56.0	54.0
66466	79.0	55.0	53.0
66469	79.0	56.0	53.0
66472	79.0	55.0	53.0
66475	79.0	54.0	53.0
66478	79.0	55.0	54.0
66481	79.0	55.0	53.0
66484	79.0	55.0	53.0
66487	79.0	56.0	53.0
66490	79.0	55.0	53.0
66493	79.0	56.0	53.0
66497	79.0	55.0	53.0
66500	79.0	55.0	54.0
66503	79.0	55.0	53.0
66506	78.0	55.0	53.0
66509	79.0	56.0	54.0
66512	79.0	55.0	53.0

 

So there is something about my machine that Oblivion just does not like. And I have no idea what it is, or even why it suddenly started not liking it.

[cmkennedy]

Just to completely remove the Realtek device from consideration, I removed the Realtek drivers, restarted, canceled any attempt by Windows to install drivers, disabled the device in Device Manager, then tried again. Still crashed.

 

Also removed NVIDIA drivers, restarted and let Windows install its own drivers. Didn't work either.

 

I have nothing.

[Striker879]

Those lists weren't bad ... I was expecting a DXDiag sized list. I agree with your assessment that temperatures aren't the issue, and I also think that sound has been eliminated as well. Don't worry, your not alone in the 'grasping at straws' stage.

 

I'm going to suggest that we force shader model 3.0 (your card should support it no problem). Here's a quote from Koroush Ghazi's Oblivion Tweak Guide:

bAllow30Shaders=0 - If set to 1, this option allows (but does not force) the use of Shader Model 3.0 on graphics cards which support it, namely Nvidia GeForce 6600 or newer, or ATI X1000 series or newer. This can potentially improve performance when using HDR rendering for example. Check your RendererInfo.txt file in your \Documents and Settings\User\Documents\My Games\Oblivion directory to see if your card supports SM3.0 next to the option '3.0 Shaders'. Note however that even by enabling this option, Oblivion still appears to use 2.0 shaders (check the 'PSTarget' and 'VSTarget' lines in Rendererinfo.txt). In any case, if you have one of the cards mentioned above, it cannot hurt to enable this option.

 

Update: To force the actual use of 3.0 Shaders after making the above change, you will also need to check your RenderInfo.txt file (see above), and on the last line of the file check which shader package it uses (e.g. Shader Package : 13). Then go to the \Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data\Shaders\ folder and rename that particular package to something else (e.g. rename shaderpackage013.sdp to shaderpackage013._bak. Now copy shaderpackage019.sdp and paste it back into the same directory, and rename this new copy to the package name your card uses (e.g. rename it to shaderpackage013.sdp in this example). This will force Oblivion to use the Shader Model 3.0 shaders in the game, which may increase (or reduce) performance and typically shows no image quality difference.

The file RendererInfo.txt is in the same folder as your Oblivion.ini:

Renderer Device Information:
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT 
nv4_disp.dll
RenderPath         		: BSSM_SV_2_A
PSversion          		: 300
VSversion          		: 300
VStarget           		: vs_2_0
PStarget           		: ps_2_a
PS2xtarget         		: ps_2_a
maxPS20inst        		: 512
3.0 Shaders        		: yes
Image space effects		: yes
Nonpowerof2textures		: yes
FP16ARGB blending  		: yes
FP16ARGB filtering 		: yes
High dynamic range 		: yes
Bloom lighting     		: no
Refraction         		: yes
2.0 hair           		: yes
SLI mode           		: no
Water shader       		: yes
Water reflections  		: yes
Water displacement 		: yes
Water high res     		: yes
Multisample Type   		: 0
Shader Package     		: 13

I'm not sure how much other direct comparison you could make between my file and yours ... we're both NVIDIA but after my SLI rig died I've had to limp along on the GeForce 9800 GT I had kicking around spare. Providing your RendererInfo.txt says you're good to go with SM 3.0 it's a matter of renaming two files ... like Koroush's example my case involved renaming my original shaderpackage013.sdp and then renaming a copy of my original shaderpackage019.sdp to shaderpackage013.sdp (to be on the safe side it wouldn't hurt to backup your entire Oblivion\Data\Shaders folder to a location outside of your Oblivion folder).

 

The other thing you could check is the line:

bFullBrightLighting=0

also in the Graphics section of Oblivion.ini. If it is set to 1 it could be causing grief (it's meant for machines that are marginal for playing the game ... that's not your machine).

Edited February 7, 2012 by Striker879