Help - Exterior World Space Freezes and CTDs

[MadWizard25]

I get CTDs and freezes in Exterior World spaces quite often, and it is becoming a major irritant. The freezes are total; i have to ctrl+alt+delete TESV.exe to exit Skyrim, and the CTDs are CTDs without any warning. This only occurs in world spaces, i.e. outdoors, wilderness, etc. My experience with oblivion tells me this is a mesh issue usually, but disabling mesh mods does not seem to fix the issue for me. Before i launch into frantic troubleshooting mode I was hoping if anybody else had experienced this issue? Any help or ideas would be appreciated, as i desperately try to avoid disabling mods one by one.

 

Additional Info:

- Only since latest patch

- Occurs with STEP setup, without any extra mods, vanilla is fine

- Occurs with or without texture optimization

- Occurs when trying out a new game

- Searched nexus, bethesda, and steam forums to no avail. plenty of people seem to have this issue? (in reality probably small minority)

- SoS sound mods do not cause it

- I occasionally hit 2GB VRAM allocation (use?), but using skyrim performance monitor shows that the crashes are not linked to hitting the VRAM ceiling

- Using gamebooster, steam offline, no overlay, all desktop notifications/ popups disabled, fully defragged

- Tried Papyrus and budgetcap ini tweaks

- Clearing all cells after 31 day wait, no effect

 

So if anybody has experienced this issue and/ or somehow fixed it, even if it was with one of the things i already tried above, i would grateful for any comments. Thanks!

 

Edit:

- Freezes and CTDs, occurring frequently, averaging ever 15/ 20 minutes.

- Default ini's, (uGrids=5) after other ini tweaks failed to fix the issue

- Verified game cache

 

Second Edit:

- fps booster did not help

- cpu core affinity did not work

- underclock did not work

[torminater]

checked it out, too.

no CtD there.

[auroreb]

Have you tried raising the "uExterior Cell Buffer" value in the ini file WITHOUT changing the "Ugridstoload" value?

I had CTD/freezes outdoors with Ugridstoload=7, uExterior Cell Buffer=64, but everything seems fine with Ugridstoload=7, uExterior Cell Buffer=100

Maybe you could try Ugridstoload=5, uExterior Cell Buffer=64

 

On a side note: at first I reverted to the standard values of 5/36, and didn't suffer any CTD, but even with STEP the game looked pretty ugly imho, or at least non immersive at all with all the buildings, trees, textures, etc. popping out every 10 seconds or so :(

I would advise anyone unable to run STEP with a Ugridstoload value of 7 or 9 to desinstall some of the biggest texture mods (or downgrade them to medium res version, or try Texture Optimizer) rather than returning to the standard value of Ugridstoload=5.

[z929669]

uGridsToLoad & uExteriorCellBuffer scale together by the formula:

 

uExteriorCellBuffer = (uGridsToLoad + 1)^2

 

Increasing the latter by a small amount should be OK, but I have never had any problems with the default scaling.

[auroreb]

I know the formula but I thought it only served as a recommanded way of calculating the Cell Buffer when tweaking the ini file.

Are you sure it makes no difference for the game engine?

I did encounter less CTD with a higher Cell Buffer...

[stoppingby4now]

I believe that formula was established as a reference to the default values, and initial testing following the same ratio. I personally have found no harm in increasing Cell Buffer, and go beyond the formula value when setting uGrids to 7. I too have experienced more stability by doing so. The only question about increasing is if there is a point where it becomes detrimental. I don't know the answer to that, so the usual BE CAREFUL applies.

[z929669]

True enough. Scaling may be closer to exponential than linear. Perhaps add 2 or three before squaring. Or even true exponential... meaning that uGrids 7 should have uExterriorCellBuffer=128 Under this scenario, uGrids 5 wiould have 32 rather than 36, so it could be that as one approaches zero, the expected formula breaks down, hence the added +4.

[MadWizard25]

I wish my SSD would have space for skyrim and all its mods, but its only 60GB, most of the space goes to windows 7, various programs that can take advantage of SSD, and Battlefield 3. Bf3 is there to stay since less lag/ stutter via faster read/ write speeds = better competitive play in multiplayer.

 

Well, im no longer experiencing CTDs/ freezes. At the moment the issues has been fixed by removing bethesdas hi-res texture dlc, vano's hi-res dlc optimzed hi-res, as well as using lite versions of SRO and SkyHD 2k. VRAM use dropped drastically from 1.5GB average, 2GB peak, to 1GB average, 1.6GB peak.

 

That means im leaning towards to 2 conclusions atm. The first is that a 2GB gtx 560ti cannot handle ultra setting with all hi-res texture packs at 1280x1024... Im suspicious of this since i was freezing/ crashing at low to average vram use, such as 1.5GB, and not at peak. Dont think its hard drive related either because one would expect a ctd/ freeze then if you would also hit vram peak?

 

Or Bethesdas hi-res DLCs were conflicting with something/ are bugged, maybe vanos optimized pack. However, why it would i dont know. Overwrites are ensured via WB.

 

Or its something totally random, unexplained that was spanner in the games engine. Will try adding all those uninstalled textures packs back one by one to see where exactly it went south.

 

One issue that now is coming to light is purple textures sometimes at very far distances, such as viewing the sea from on top of a mountain. Ill grap a pic in a bit.

[z929669]

weird stuff going on with your setup MW. I think it is worth a full uninstall/reinstall just to be sure (yes, this is my answer to just about everything ;) )

[MontyMM]

@MadWizard

 

If it were hard disk-related, it would not necessarily occur at time of peak VRAM, but perhaps more likely upon cell transition, as a large amount of new data is suddenly demanded by the engine. I can say that when I experienced frequent CTDs (back when I first tried STEP a couple of months ago), then either removing large textures OR transferring to SDD would solve the problem. Once I had all textures enabled on the SSD, I tried transferring back to a different HDD, and the crashes returned. Maybe you could temporarily move Skyrim to the SSD to test this - I'd love someone to corroborate my pet theory. :D

[stoppingby4now]

@Monty,

Out of curiosity, what were the specs on the hard drive you were using? RPM? Access Time? Cache?

[auroreb]

My 2 cent again.

I have a SSD (Vertex 3 128gb) and a 7950 3gb and still encountered CTD before raising the Cell Buffer value.

My install is clean as I installed STEP from scratch with MO.

CTD used to happen right before big cities/landscape (Markath, Windhelm) so your theory about "a large amount of new data is suddenly demanded by the engine" seems correct but not drive related imho.

I didn't mention that I also had CTD with Sounds of Skyrim (even with the patch installed), will try to reinstall it now that I have no more CTD.

[MadWizard25]

@ z92

Yeah i think your correct, messed around with the setup too much now, probably done some damage :D Just need some good time spare for that.

 

@Monty

Ok, when i do the reinstall ill switch skyrim to my SSD. Will uninstall bf3 for a bit. Important question about this though, i will need to use steammover program for this, would not have space on the SSD for other steam games. Ive read somewhere that there are issues with the junction files created during this procedure with Skyrim and/or WB. In addition, i would also not be able to move the WB Skyrim Mods folder that contains all the mod archives due to space constraints again, would moving the Skyrim direction break WB in this regard? Or is a simple step of tweaking the bash.ini file?

 

@auroreb, nice comp :P

I did try raising the exterior cell buffer value as a fix, but it didnt work. However, ill test out an increase again with my new setup to see if it helps reduce stuttering. I also tried without any SoS mods, even the fix, and the CTDs/freezes persisted.

[stoppingby4now]

My 2 cent again.

I have a SSD (Vertex 3 128gb) and a 7950 3gb and still encountered CTD before raising the Cell Buffer value.

My install is clean as I installed STEP from scratch with MO.

CTD used to happen right before big cities/landscape (Markath, Windhelm) so your theory about "a large amount of new data is suddenly demanded by the engine" seems correct but not drive related imho.

I didn't mention that I also had CTD with Sounds of Skyrim (even with the patch installed), will try to reinstall it now that I have no more CTD.

 

Yeah, that has to be either a mod conflict or ini setting causing the problem.

[llfbandit]

@MadWizard25

I can confirm that your video shoudn't be the entire problem.

I've the exact same card with 1920*1024 resolution and I experienced many freezes (outside whiterun, going straight forward to the down river for example) and game loading when directly outside.

I mention also that I freshly installed STEP and skyrim for a new game.

 

After, optimized textures the problem has been solved (at least for the 5 hours I played last two nights).

 

Just few changes on my config. uGrid => 7 and shadows configured with this values https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=7638

[blacksol]

Ok after a fair bit of testing I still get CTD at Dawnstar and seemingly nowhere else after running around the skyrim countryside and fast travelling etc for an hour or two. Every time I go to dawnstar I CTD except one time my shadows were borked (likely from too much alt-tabbing to see VRAM in GPU-Z or ini files having a few instances of 2 lines on one row) and it didn't crash and VRAM was down about 750 due to no shadows.

 

I uninstalled SkyrimHD and changed a couple of other exterior mods to lower resolutions. VRAM is generally still in 1100-1200's (on a 1280 GTX 570) and frequently at 1250 in various places without CTD. Does not appear to be a VRAM spike in Dawnstar. Changed exteriorcellbuffer to 100 on ugrids 7 and still no issues anywhere but Dawnstar. Tried other towns in skyrim worldspace eg Morthal and no issues. On these settings seems to run smoother apart from some stutters on cell transitions.

 

Rest is pretty much full STEP install with optimized vanilla and DLC textures.

 

So beats me why i CTD at Dawnstar but looks to be unrelated to your issue.