Occasional CTDs - normal?

[rjb]

Upgrading my PC and discovering the mod community for oblivion really breathed life back into the game for me. But it seems that whenever I'm playing a heavily modded game I experience occasional random CTDs - sometimes I'll play for 3hrs without a problem, other times it will crash every 15 minutes or so. As they seem to be completely random it's not easy to troubleshoot by disabling mods - I just wondered if there's another way to track down problems, or if I should just put up with it.

 

I don't think these are hardware / heat related - this machine has been solid while playing team fortress 2 and other titles.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Varus Torvyn]

Upgrading my PC and discovering the mod community for oblivion really breathed life back into the game for me. But it seems that whenever I'm playing a heavily modded game I experience occasional random CTDs - sometimes I'll play for 3hrs without a problem, other times it will crash every 15 minutes or so. As they seem to be completely random it's not easy to troubleshoot by disabling mods - I just wondered if there's another way to track down problems, or if I should just put up with it.

 

I don't think these are hardware / heat related - this machine has been solid while playing team fortress 2 and other titles.

 

Thanks in advance.

Hi, rjb. The CTDs you're experiencing aren't unique to just your Oblivion or your PC. This happens to all of us. It was actually worse for me two years ago before I installed the Unofficial Patches. I had complete lock-ups. The Unofficial Patches fixed those.

 

Check your graphics drivers. Having the very latest WHQL version is best.

 

Oblivion isn't the only RPG on the market that has CTDs. The Witcher CTDs at times as well. But when you do have a CTD it is a normal occurence. If an application does something as simple as return a value that Windows doesn't like, it can cause a CTD.

[rjb]

Thanks for the reply. I understand Oblivion isn't alone here, and it's a small price to pay for such fantastic additional content. I'll check on my drivers and save frequently :)

[thomasv333]

Upgrading my PC and discovering the mod community for oblivion really breathed life back into the game for me. But it seems that whenever I'm playing a heavily modded game I experience occasional random CTDs - sometimes I'll play for 3hrs without a problem, other times it will crash every 15 minutes or so. As they seem to be completely random it's not easy to troubleshoot by disabling mods - I just wondered if there's another way to track down problems, or if I should just put up with it.

 

I don't think these are hardware / heat related - this machine has been solid while playing team fortress 2 and other titles.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

The CTDs you are experiencing are unfortunately a normal occurrence for Oblivion, my game is running pretty healthy as best I can tell and I average CTDs between 20 and 45 min. Sometimes it will CTD 2min after loading and other times it will run for over 2hrs no problem. I have noticed more CTDs in wilderness areas than any where else.

 

I have a tip for you that cut my CTDs by 75 percent, I am running a NiVidia 8800GTX card on a pretty robust system and I tweaked my NiVidia hardware settings to the "better performance" option for every setting. This change helped ALOT.

 

Have fun & happy modding. :biggrin:

[William123456789]

Im no super tech but oblivion acts like it doesent....Refresh it just keeps storeing stuff on your ram then crashes. I have tried adjusting a ton of stuff but in the end the onlything that made it atleast "last longer" is more ram. The patches and codec fixes and ini fixes were all completely useless they didnt help one bit. More ram make the game play longer other then that you can simply improve performance.

[billypnats]

yea i used to have CTDs all the time, but it was all better after getting 2 gig of ram and a better gpu..

[gohan2091]

I have a very powerful computer and mine CTD too. Sometimes it can happen within 5 minutes, over times it can take hours. I have a few suggestions for you:

 

- Order your mods using FCOM Helper. You don't need FCOM installed for it to work, simply download it and run the bat file from inside the data folder and it will set your mods in the order it thinks best. I highly recommend this, if you only take one of my suggestions, take this one.

 

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16375 (Be sure to get the 29th September updated database)

 

- Turn off xfire if you use it

 

- Get the unofficial and official patches

 

- Read the Oblivion tweak guide to ensure your oblivion.ini file is making use of all your memory and multicore processor (if you have one)

 

If you quicksave (F5) every few minutes, the CTD shouldn't really be a problem. Oh, and type tdt, then sdt 13 in the console, and monitor your memory useage. If your game is using high amounts like 800mb or more, this could cause CTD.

[Woodiron]

EDIT: If I were you I would be VERY CAREFUL about using quicksave. I heard that using quicksave can lead to CTDs and the file can become corrupt, so you can't load it. This is definitely true in my experience, both for the CTDs and the file becoming corrupt. I would suggest saving normally and either overwriting previous saves or deleting unneeded saves from "My Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Saves" at the end of your session (or both).

 

I get frequent CTDs, and it definitely seems to be getting worse the more mods I download (but I don't want to start a new game!).

 

In my experience, the more demand there is on the computer's memory (not the graphics card), the more likely it is to crash. I had a huge mound of gems in one room and another pile of Welkend stones in an adjacent one. Almost guaranteed a CTD whenever I went there. I don't know if buying moar RAM would help.

 

I've noticed that the game will always crash when I try to load a save that was made in a different cell to the one I'm in when I try to load it. It might just be me, but if not then it's useful to know.

 

I would check the extent of your save bloat. A new character with few mods will be less than 1 MB. Once the save file reaches about 10MB problems start to creep in, including extended load times, increased game instability and CTDs, and at extreme levels, considerable performance loss and an inability to load the game. Some mods are rather badly written and cause bloat, for example by placing hundreds of new items into the world (not into containers, where they don't need an individual reference).

[thomasv333]

Im no super tech but oblivion acts like it doesent....Refresh it just keeps storeing stuff on your ram then crashes. I have tried adjusting a ton of stuff but in the end the onlything that made it atleast "last longer" is more ram. The patches and codec fixes and ini fixes were all completely useless they didnt help one bit. More ram make the game play longer other then that you can simply improve performance.

 

 

Yes, more RAM more RAM more RAM, oblivion seems to manage memory usage fairly poorly so the more room it has to store textures/meshes/world spaces the happier it seems to behave. I recommend more than 2Gigs or RAM, I am running 4Gigs of Dual DDR 800Mhz ram but am only utilizing (3Gigs under windows XP Pro) and the game seems to run pretty good.

 

Also a low end (GPU) graphics card, will constantly overheat and crash your game because Oblivion is so grapics intensive. (I had this problem with a Nividia 6800GT running game on high graphics mode, I upgraded to a Nividia 8800GTX and I can run ALL graphic settings maxed out with Qarl's texture pack 3 installed no problem.)

 

Also, Try "TweakOblivion", it has some options, to expand cell buffer size, and purge your memory while the game is running.

 

So do mods like "Streamline" (try both the 3.0 and 3.1 versoins) system stability varies from PC to PC. The 3.1 version gave me CTDs constantly but ALOT of people use the 3.0 version and swear it helps alot.

 

Also mods like "Operation Optimization" and "OblivionScriptOptimization" may help.

 

For general preformance also checkout "Optimised Distant Land MAX", TweakOblivion (various tweaks), the varoius short/optimized grass mods.

 

 

Good luck. :thumbsup:

[Woodiron]

In this thread: people boasting about their computers' specs.