sudden black screen then full crash

Post » Thu May 31, 2012 4:21 am

I recently got my mind on trying Skyrim again to see if all the bugs where gone for me. Most are gone but now i have this major issue that causes my PC to completely crash so i have to force restart it.
It can come at any point in the game, normally after a few mihokers and it maybe just maybe i think its the same spot in the game.
The screen first turns completely black but i can still hear the sound in the background, 5 or 10 seconds later the sound freezes too and stutters. I cant ALT TAB out or use CTRL ALT DEL. Only holding power button down and shut down my PC will work.

My system is as following

Intel I7 920 @ 4GHz
3 x 2GB corsair dominator RAM
2 x HD6950 crossfire setup
Windows 7 pro x64

im using driver ver 12.1 also tried 12.2 and cap 12.1
im using the official HD pack for the game.
I tried setting the video ram to 1000MHz since i saw that somewhere to have helped some, but without any luck.

I dont use any mods its a fresh install, also dont use any overclocking tools for my HD6950's

Can anyone please help me. I've had this game since release and i have never been able to fully enjoy this game. I dont get why its so hard to make a game work properly since everyone else can, meaning all my other games runs just fine with no issues at all, only skyrim.
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Nicola
 
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Post » Thu May 31, 2012 7:37 am

I have this same issue (since 1.5) and I have found if I hit my ESC button it will return to the game menu screen and then I can resume the game from there. Works for me, it may work for you.
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stevie trent
 
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Post » Thu May 31, 2012 3:43 pm

I have this same issue (since 1.5) and I have found if I hit my ESC button it will return to the game menu screen and then I can resume the game from there. Works for me, it may work for you.

No luck here sadly
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Bellismydesi
 
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Post » Thu May 31, 2012 4:27 am

Opt in for the new Beta... It fixed my random CTDs... Otherwise, not sure what to do. Good luck!
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Lawrence Armijo
 
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Post » Thu May 31, 2012 5:03 am

Ooh, repeated bad shutdowns/hard boots like that aren't good for the OS, it can become corrupted over time. Here's part of a list of keyboard shortcuts that might be useful to you:

Windows 7 Keyboard Shortcuts
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Keyboard-shortcuts

Ctrl+Esc - Open the Start menu
Ctrl+Shift+Esc - Open Task Manager
Windows logo key +D - Display the desktop
Windows logo key +R - Open the Run dialog box

Any way at all that you can get Task Manager to open will allow you to terminate the game from the Applications tab, thereby avoiding a hard boot. If you can get to the Run box, type in: taskmgr.exe

Have you had a look-see in your PC's Management > Event Viewer? See if there's any reports that match the time when the game hangs. Check in both the System & Application folders. But unfortunately, when the PC is hard booted the OS doesn't always leave reports of what happened. So, if there's no other issues with your PC, you could clear the Event folders and wait to catch the game hanging. If you're able to avoid hard booting there should be a report(s) that'll give you a clue as to what's going wrong.
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Lily Something
 
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Joined: Thu Jun 15, 2006 12:21 pm

Post » Thu May 31, 2012 5:24 pm

I found a new solution. atiumdag.dll
So far so good. Though in the menu's the screen flickers but so far no crashes.
Dunno who to bash at. AMD or Bethesda or just poor communication between them
Anyone wanna trade 2 HD6950 for 2 GTX560 TI? :D
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dav
 
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Joined: Mon Jul 30, 2007 3:46 pm

Post » Thu May 31, 2012 7:35 am

These black screen hard crashes have been a known issue for a considerable amount of people since release. Some people report newer/later drivers and patches fixed it for them, others had hardware faults, while others still have no solution. It's been reported by both ATI and Nvidia users with a very wide range of cards and manufacturers.

What was reasonably determined over about 100 pages of forum threads was that Skyrim is calling the video driver to do *something*, and the driver does not know how to handle the request so it tries to shut down and restart the driver which would normally just cause a CTD, but it's unable to restart the driver for some reason causing your whole system to hang until it is hard rebooted. It could be an issue with Skyrims code, or it could be an issue with the physical hardware, or it could be some obscure driver issue, there's unfortunately no real way to tell outside of a lab setting with some sort of external debugging setup logging the games calls to the video card when it hangs. As far as I know Bethesda has made no direct acknowledgment of the issue, all we can really hope is that the mysterious "code optimizations" in the patch notes inadvertently solve the issue.

I suffered from the same issue at release, and decided to just shelf the game entirely for a good year so they can hopefully patch up all the awful bugs and the Modding community can take care of the rest. Hopefully the patches or a whole new system eventually fixes the issue.
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Lawrence Armijo
 
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