Accepting infrequent CTDs as part of TES life ?

[seanxx]

Do I need to just accept that Skyrim will sometimes ctd and there isnt much I can do about it ?

 

Ive been having some ctd issues, maybe once every 3 or 4 hours. its not a huge bummer but it does get me down at times.

Running some texture mods, face,weapon,armour, CoT,asis, nothing too extreme, I change about half my mod list every-time i start a new game and avoid changing mods during a game.

Tessedit my update.esm, BOSS(ed) my load order, updated my gpu driver, looked over my papyrus log, you know all the regular ctd fixes but the CTDs seem to still persist.

Accept it as part of a TES life and that's that ?

 

me-560ti, 2500k, 8gb ram, 64bit windows 7.

[Deleted3507349User]

I just bought that card myself, and returned it because of crashes. When I was using my old 2008-vintage Radeon (2400XT w/256Mb) Skyrim flat-out NEVER crashed. Just upgrading to this so-called 'better' card caused nothing but crashes everywhere. I returned the 560Ti and traded it for a Radeon xfx 6670. If Radeon doesn't play any nicer I'll go back to my old card and live with lower graphics and and frame rates.

[Merc616]

A CTD once every 3 to 4 hours isn't bad. I could live with that. I get them every 30 to 45 minutes with a GTX 460. I have a lot of mods installed I just can't help it. I'm pretty sure it's due to VRAM bursts because it seems to happen after traveling through many different areas. I'm getting a card with 2GB of VRAM any day now so I'll find out if that fixes the problem.

 

Have you tried the texture optimizer? It'll free up a lot of VRAM with no noticeable loss in quality. I reduced my textures folder by 1/2 a GB.

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12801/?tab=3&navtag=%2Fajax%2Fmodimages%2F%3Fuser%3D0%26id%3D12801

Edited November 13, 2012 by Merc616

[bben46]

It may be your computer that needs optimizing instead of the game - covered in the general section of my troubleshooting blog. http://s1.zetaboards.../4751769/1/#new

 

Also, Bethsoft is infamous for poor ram management. I find that taking a break every hour or so helps both with crashes and some kinds of slow downs - as well as my aging eyes, back and posterior. Save and exit the game. Look at the clock (have I really been playing that long :psyduck:.) Get up and walk around, stretch, check to see how much the grass has grown since last time you looked. (go outside) :rolleyes: Pay some attention to your significant other - hopefully you do have one - if not you may be playing too much. :blush: Get a beverage (adult or otherwise) then sit back down and reload your save. This not only helps your game play better, but helps YOU to play better as well. :thumbsup:

[Deepblue321]

I used to get a lot of random CTDs when getting to high levels so here's what I did.

Remove auto save in all it's instances (on entering a building, on fast travel, etc) and disable Steam cloud for this game.

 

I know it's nothing to do with graphics cards or any hardware but now I very rarely get CTDs and I can get up to level 40

Sometimes I get a persistent CTD when I go down a certain route, but then I change my route and don't go down the route that has the CTD until after a few ingame days (sometimes weeks) until it's sorted out and try again.

[69mAnU96]

@bben46

you advices are solid common sense and a funny read :-)

Edited November 13, 2012 by 69mAnU96

[acidzebra]

accepting infrequent CTDs as part of TES life

 

Maybe

 

maybe once every 3 or 4 hours

 

...that's more like clockwork.

 

It's very possible to get a solid Skyrim. But you have to be willing to experiment (and for heaven's sake, DO NOT do that with your main save - keep a stable collection of mods on any run because pulling and adding mods at random during an in progress game is asking for trouble - use wrye bash to keep saves and mod profiles separate) and maybe give up on some mods you thought were awesome because they give you trouble. Maybe you can run them in a different combo on a different save profile.

 

It's often combinations of mods which give you grief - mods which are fine in other combinations. This can be hard to track down. Warzones + monster wars + monster mod + ASIS + HD textures was a recipe for trouble on my machine - but warzones does just fine in a different profile which has almost no other mods in it and no HD textures, and monster wars runs like a dream on another. On my aging machine I had to pull the HD textures altogether even though it made me sad to do so. Just couldn't hack it.

 

And as bben46 points out, your computer is not a gaming console by default, it's a general purpose machine. Make sure there is as little nonsense running as possible. Use autoruns to have a look at your startup programs and services.

Edited November 13, 2012 by acidzebra

[seanxx]

Thanks Guys,

Bben, i was just reading all your posts yesterday, thanks for all the info.

I keep my pc is good nic, all autosave functions within skyrim have been disabled, avoid mods that even a hint of ctd issue around them,

The crashes are random and not repeatable, sometimes i can play 3 hours and not have any, other times within an hour, So i think its just me hitting my 560ti 1gb ram wall.

Nothing i can do really except take a rest every bow and then or tone down the texture mods/settings or buy a newer card, Im waiting for the gtx 670 to drop in price

fingers crossed.

 

merc, texture optimizer= i will read up on that one this weekend, looks scary for a novice but im willing to give ti a go, thanks

[SmokedOne]

Yeah vanilla Skyrim 1.7+ is much more stable than any with mods. If you noticed, Bethesda purposefully limited the number of NPC's, even in battles for towns so that your computer and the game wouldn't be over encumbered by the number of polygons it has to draw out. Also, I've noticed that some of the NPC mods are made using external editors such as NPCEdit which is filled with errors because it wasn't properly created in Creation Kit so it has a lot of code out of order which the game will flag as an error but will eventually load it. But if you have too many of those NPCs in the same cell, the game will either infinite load or just crash to desktop.

 

I've changed added/changed out about 250 or so mods during my main character and yeah sometimes I get worried it won't load (stuck infinite loading a few times). But you can always try to "recover" that save via another save. If you have a game that just keeps doing infinite loads, you can load up a new game which will preload all the main bsa's from your master and plugin files, then load the save that you're having trouble with, instead of loading directly when you start the game. Oh and here's another tip, in your Skyrim.ini file there's a script memory limit. If you have a lot of mods and are experiencing scripting loss issues (i.e. better vampires mod), you can raise your scripting memory limit. That will help your scripts to run right, but don't raise it too much, the more memory you allot there, the slower your game will be since scripts are always running in the background.

[TaterChip]

I have about 143 mods working together at any given time. The only time I seem to get a CTD is at a loading screen. For some reason it just hangs up and keeps on smokin in the background... nothing I change seems to fix it. My comp. is more than capable of running Skyrim at max... but maybe the game itself is limited to loading only so many things.

 

I'm sure almost everyone is going to get a CTD anywhere if they're too many things to render, or if Ugrids are set to 9 or higher. But that's the Skyrim life I suppose.

 

As far as mods... after trying out so many and getting use to scripting I found that anything script heavy is probably not very reliable. Crimson blood/Warzones/Locational Damage etc. all seem to give me rouble... err trouble