Textures missing, massive stutters around towns, and CTDs after an hou

[ripple]

The problem is not the game but that you have heavily modded it. If you were just running vanilla Skyrim, you wouldn't need any of those utilities. But once you start modding, and modding the game heavily, those tools become necessities. Given your system spec and extensive mod list, I am not sure it can handle amidian's hi-res armour retextures. Try uninstalling his mods and see if the 'gradually missing textures' problem goes away or at least improves. If it helps with the stuttering too, even better, but there might be multiple issues caused by multiple things so we'll eliminate them one by one until your game stabilizes on all fronts.

 

Also, try this:

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/4192

Edited April 21, 2013 by ripple

[thunderwolf86]

true, this is also the first time iv ever really played a game where I heavily modded it, so a lot of stuff, despite having played the game for a few months, is still new to me. interesting, well ill start there then and uninstall amidianborn and give it a try tomorrow as im out of time tonight to give it a proper test. if that's the case that's disappointing but manageable, at least until I can upgrade my system. as for the link, im assuming that just simply buying more RAM wouldn't solve that problem but if it turns out that my system cant handle the textures then I will give that a try as well.

thanks again for your help, ill let you know tomorrow how it goes.

[ripple]

No problem. You are right that adding RAM won't help much. Skyrim is still a 32-bit application, so while extra RAM can be used for background processes (and freeing up more RAM for Skyrim), Skyrim still will not use more than 4GB. So given that 4GB is what you have, it's more 'economical' to simply run something like the Gamebooster to shut down all those unnecessary background processes before Skyrim launches. Minus the fact that you have a 32-bit OS, technically speaking your rig should be able to handle a heavily modded Skyrim without technical issues (mods related issues another matter), even with the hi-res textures DLC and amidian textures (my system spec is slightly below yours and I got both installed, although my HD 7850 is the 2GB model). I am not sure exactly what sort of 'performance difference' exists between running Skyrim in a 64-bit OS and a 32-bit one, but this may be one of them, because with your spec you shouldn't be experiencing difficulties with running out of VRAM and rendering textures (e.g. textures gradually failing to load the longer you play, rather than textures never showing up properly to begin with, which would point to a 'mod installation' problem), considering that you are not even using the hi-res DLC.

 

Incidentally, which version of the AMD catalyst driver are you using?

Edited April 21, 2013 by ripple

[thunderwolf86]

no luck im afraid, with amidianborn uninstalled I still had the same problem, the stutters, missing textures and eventual crash happened as normal., almost as if they were set to a timer.

hmm, if that's the case then im completely lost as to what the problem could be, if not mod caused issues then I really don't know. as for which AMD catalyst driver am I using, that's more of the I don't know how to find that out problem, I can probably find out later on tonight as I have a friend that I talk to every night who is a wizard with computers (yet is also stumped at my problem just the same). he can direct me to finding out what my driver is.

but yeah uninstalling amidianborn did not make a difference in this case im afraid.

[pheo3309]

I noticed that you have the High Resolution Packs as well. Have you tried disabling those too? I think I've heard of issues where people are missing textures and it can cause stutter. I'm not sure if this is the source of the issue, but it wouldn't hurt to check. If it's not then I think I'm as stumped as you are. o_o

[thunderwolf86]

I have them yes, but they are not installed, I experienced missing textures and CTDs almost instantly after I installed those packs so I just disabled them. although I am curious as to why they appear in my boss log even though I don't have them checked to load, along with a couple other things in the boss log (ie Cloaks - Player Only is appearing in the boss log but I unchecked that in my load order, so why is it there?). I didn't notice that until you mentioned it, could that have anything to do with the problem? unchecking mods in the load order maybe isn't enough or something?

[ripple]

They show up in the BOSS log as not active, so they look like they have been deactivated per your load order settings. You can go ahead an delete the optional cloak plugins. They are completely unnecessary if using Wrye Bash to generate a Bashed Patch for the leveled lists (unless you want to intentionally punish the NPCs in your game by depriving them of cloaks). But the 'symptoms' of what you are describing right now sounds like hardware issues or at least software issues external to mods. One possibility is 'overheating' of your PC components, so the longer you play, these 'missing texture' problems start to crop up.

 

To check your driver version, open the Catalyst Control Center and click on information/software, and it will display which version of the Catalyst driver you have, then we can see if updating drivers is needed. If that doesn't pan out, then you may need to download some programs to check your system temperature in real-time.

Edited April 22, 2013 by ripple

[thunderwolf86]

yeah I adjusted those few mods that have that problem, still working on the wrye bash part of things, but that's coming, I just want to make sure im doing it right before I actually make the bashed patch.

 

ah perfect thanks, my friend didn't show tonight so I thought id leave it for tomorrow. now the layout is a little confusing as it says both catalyst version and driver version seperetally but here goes.

Catalyst Version 13.1

I hope that's the right number im looking for.

[ripple]

13.1 is the latest stable release version of the Catalyst driver, so you don't need to update it unless you want to give the 13.3 beta a try. AMD cards are decent but their driver support is just utter crap. But even for Catalyst drivers, this is abnormal. CTDs can be caused by many factors, but I am really starting to suspect the 'gradually disappearing textures' issue as that of the GPU overheating. Mods can't cause this. If meshes and textures from mods were not installed properly, they would not show up properly in game to begin with.

There are many programs for monitoring system temperature, but most just produce 'postmortem' logs. So I use MSI Afterburner and HWInfo. Afterburner which will allow you to monitor the GPU temperature in 'real-time' by displaying both your FPS and GPU temperature in game, and HWInfo will monitor the CPU temperature and also display it in game if you have Afterburner installed. The setup for these programs are not particularly 'newbie-friendly' so if you can get your friend to help, it should make it easier (otherwise you can post questions here). Once you have them set up to display your GPU and CPU temperature in game, you can then see if this is an issue of 'overheating' (if the temperature rises past a certain point when the 'missing texture' issue starts occurring, followed by stuttering, freezes, then CTD).

Incidentally, have you played any other current games on this machine aside from Skyrim? Did you experience issues with those games?

Edited April 22, 2013 by ripple

[thunderwolf86]

I experienced issues with a lot of my games for a few months there and bought a new graphics card to counter the problems. before that I had complete system crashes when playing skyrim, fallout 3, dishonored, battlefield 3, flatout, and few others. the only ones that weren't crashing my system were source games (l4d, css, portal 1&2, half life), and minecraft so I took a look around and found out it was due to overheating. the overheating was being caused by my failing graphics card, so I replaced it and sense then I haven't had a single problem with any game, no ctds, no full system crashes, no missing textures, nothing. ever sense then everything seems to be working just fine with the exception of skyrim.

I was toying with the notion of a complete 100% fresh install, including SKSE, but unmodded and playing the game for a bit to see if that corrects the problem, then gradually install the mods just to be sure that the problem isn't mod related (which I don't think it is, but im not certain of that). maybe theres a corrupted file in there somewhere that I cant find or something, I don't know, im just guessing at this point.

as far as those programs are concerned, thanks for the links, ill get those programs up and running and just be absolutely sure the problem isn't due to overheating when I do the fresh install mind you as I mentioned before I have had experience with my system overheating while the game is running, the only thing is that all that caused was the full system crash, I didn't notice any missing textures or stutters of any kind, just a complete crash but im not going to rule it out as a possibility at this point because I truly have no idea what could be causing this other then the fact that im running a 32bit OS.