This started a couple of weeks ago--before I got Hearthfire.

In outdoor areas the screen will freeze, go black, sounds will continue. Sometimes it comes back after 10 seconds or so, and sometimes it will CTD. Occasionally things like loading a save or going into the lockpicking routine will take as much as 30 seconds to load.

Sometimes water is invisible. Sometimes texture detail is gone--ground areas are solid grey as are the bodies of dragons during a battle. My map will become very fuzzy. Other times all clothing and other body detail will be solid shiny white. When walking through woods the shadows under the trees will suddenly contrast very heavily with the non-shaded areas as I walk in and out of them. (It's almost like the tree shadows were imitating dragon shadows, if you catch my meaning.) Saving and reloading usually, but not always, solves the problem. (I have screen shots of most of this, but of course Photobucket has just mutated in a new and unusable format, so I can't put them up until I find a new host.)

All my settings are at medium, except for shadow detail which I put to low to see if it would solve that problem. Otherwise, these are the settings that the game picked when I first ran it.

I have an NVidia GEforce 9800GT. All drivers are up to date as of two days ago.

My mods are:



This just started suddenly and gets worse the longer I play the game. If I play for an hour or two quit and load again immediately the problem will temporarily go away.

New drivers for old Geforces are a bad idea. Go back to the last one that worked for you.

I didn't upload the new drivers until after I started having the problem.

Since the drivers, you think, aren't a problem, you need to put those back to whatever was working, anyway, and change something else. Meanwhile, I can't read most of it, but DxDiag reports are the local stye, so attach one, but hide it with the Spoiler Tags.