Hello,

I used to play with two HD4650 in crossfire, and could play at "medium" graphics settings at ~30 FPS with no issues.

Then I upgraded to HD6870, downloaded the latest driver, and skyrim will not go past the loading screen when I press "continue" on the opening screen.
I cannot play the game.
If I choose another save to load, it crashes at the same point or 5 seconds later.
My screen goes black (no video signal) and nothing responds for 3 seconds, then the desktop appears with a notification on the task bar
"Display driver stopped responding and recovered".

I spent hours googling and reading forums and the most common "fixes" don't work:
- There's no over heating.
- I tried changing the sound setting (16 bit 41000) - nothing.
- Removed drivers and tried the last 3 drivers (12.1, 11.12, 11.11, 11.10) - nothing.
- changed all the setting to lowest possible values (lowest resolution, windowed, no AA) - nothing.

My system:
MSI 790FX GD70
AMD phenom II X4 955
8GB RAM
Sapphire HD 6870 1GB
850W PSU
Updated Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Latest DX11


Any ideas?

I forget, do custom ugrid settings get reset when you change video cards? I can't remember.
OP: What about a brand new game? How's that fare.

Edit: Actually, this does sound pretty firmly like an issue between the driver and the video hardware not so much a game settings mix up. Is the card known to work with other games? You tried it with anything else? It used (did you buy it from a shady situation where someone burnt out the card and sold it to you claiming it was new)?

I'm getting the same thing - the AMD drivers have stopped responding and have recovered message after a freeze and 5 second black screen. I thought this was the CTD everyone was suffering, but maybe it is something more specific? It has got worse for me lately, I can't play for more than 5 minutes at a time. Previously I would have some sessions with frequent CTDs and some where I could play with only 1 or 2 CTDs in a 3 hour session. I would rarely CTD in a dungeon, often outdoors or on the map screen, now I am CTDing in dungeons too.

I'm using an AMD HD5700 card, 8 gig RAM, intel i5 quad core 750 cpu, a new decent 700 watt power supply (I changed the old cheap power supply as I was getting frequent freezes and brown outs on high settings).

I have the latest drivers for everything.

I've stress tested my CPU and GPU and they perform as expected on 10 minute tests - longer than I can play Skyrim without a CTD if not a truly thorough test. I used MSI Kombustor and Intel burn test and passed both with scores that indicated there was no hardware problem.. The Burn test got my CPU temp up to over 80 degrees which seemed high but it finished 10 runs of the test ok.

I get the same CTD and driver message at the same sorts of frequency whatever settings I play at, though expect I should be able to play with reasonable stability on mostly high settings at 1920 x 1080 with my machine.

Have you tried deleting the skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini files in your documents folder and letting Skyrim re-detect your hardware when it launches. I have an HD5770 card and I have had only a couple of crashes since the 1.3.10 version of skyrim came out. One other possibility is mods. I've noticed there are some mods out there that use ESM files. If you have ESP's which are dependent upon an ESM and you uncheck that ESM the game will crash on launch (at least Oblivion did this, I never use mods which add subordinate ESM's because of this).

I've not used any mods yet, and am a bit reluctant to go deleting files, I think I'll just wait until the hopefully soon to be released next patch. If it is completely safe to delete the .ini folders you mentioned and the game recreates them at default settings, I may give it a go though.

Also, my latest save file has just gone over 10 mb in size, this is a bit smaller than those being quoted in the save file size causing CTD theory thread, but perhaps that is what has triggered the game into being unplayable.

When ever your changing major components like graphics cards, you should ALWAYS re-install your game titles. Most games have pre-defined settings and code tweaks for different manufacturers. If you then change components the game may have real problems using the prior settings. You should also be removing and re-installing your graphics drivers so that the new card is detected by the system properly and configured correctly.

Helllo Bump,

Actually you were right, I tried running other games (Starcraft2, Portal2) and it's the same problem.
The card was bought new from Amazon UK few days ago.

Is there any way to fix it, or does it mean I have to replace it?

Thanks a lot!
Edit: I don't use any mods, and Lexandro, when I started Skyrim after installing the new card it automatically detected the change and changed the graphics setting. Do you still think I should re-install all of my games? I'll give it a try and let you know.

I've been having performance issues for a while and Skyrim could not be loaded at max settings despite have a beefy system.

I wouldn't know if it would work for you but it did for me:

- Uninstalled all AMD drivers including the application profile
- Reboot machine into Safe Mode (F8 before Window loads)
- Open device manager and uninstall the device from there making sure to tick the box that deletes the driver
- Open Windows Explorer and deleted the folders AMD / ATi on the root of the C: drive
- While still in Safe Mode re-install the latest drivers and re-start the machine

For me Skyrim now works better than ever, so does LA Noire and Shogun Total War. I wish I had done this sooner!

Sorry but 10 minutes is NOT stress testing! Try http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=205http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/366d/super_pi_mod-1.5.zipfor several hours to check your CPU then get http://www.golubev.com/files/ighashgpu_latest.zip and let it bruteforce a md5 hash with your GPU:

ighashgpu -c:cs -cpudontcare -fun -min:6 -max:12 -t:md5 -h:77ad9c73074b91741b391657225bad0e

Thats what I call stress testing, also try running both tools for a few hours together at least (Prime95 stressing CPU while ighashgpu stresses your GPU - this should also reveal cooling problems if there are any)

(Please close all other Programs before stress testing your machine and consider to monitor your stresstesting with appropiate programs like http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/ and http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/ - (I recommend this and checking RAM with http://www.memtest.org/ to all who buy hardware secondhand as it clearly starts to point out problems if there are any rather soonish - Activate logging in both tools so in case your system freezes you have some data to look at) )

In my book you won't have to re-install all of your games just make sure you adjust their INI files if need be (like rename the INI files and let the game re-create them if one game does not re-create them you need to adjust them a bit like with SkyrimPrefs.ini and sD3DDevice="AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series")

I am quiet sure about this since I tend to keep ALL my games installed (on a non system partition) I have carried over installls which were made AGES ago even on a totally different system (WinXPsp3x86 now I use Win7x64) just a few registry hacks needed for each game and your good to go! Some installs are older than 5 Years and I changed quiet the bit of my system during this time like: GPU/CPU/Board/NIC/OS - No problem whatsoever if you know what you are doing.

My games folder stats: 666 GB (715.319.676.928 Bytes) this includes the Steam folder...

Btw this is howto remove leftovers of driver uninstalls on Win7 without shady 3rd party apps which costs legit users $$ (as administrator run cmd):
pnputil -e >installedDrivers.txt
notepad installedDrivers.txt (check which versions are the old ones and write down what their inf file is called then remove them like this:)
pnputil -f -d oem19.inf (I think you need to remove each inf in a seperate line like this)
shutdown -now (reboot the machine)

Ok, So I have re-installed Skyrim and Starcraft2. SC2 works now perfectly, but guess what, Skyrim still doesn't work, no change at all, and I cannot even start a new game...
Back to square one.

Help anyone?

What steps do you take for the following....

1) Install driver....

2) Test New Video card....>>yes a Brand NEW card can be faulty.

Edit: Have you tried Re-seating the Card..? Pull it and put it right back in....

I used DriverSweeper to remove old drivers, then installed the latest stable driver from AMD website (I believe that's 11.12), then restarted.
When it didn't work I did the same with versions 11.10, 11.11, and 12.1 preview, which I still have on.

To test the new video card I didn't do much beyond trying to play other games, as I described above.
After reinstalling SC2 runs fine, Skyrim still crashes.

I'll now run Furmark for couple of hours to see if the GPU is ok, and I'll come back to report.

Good ..I always stress with ...Prime95 (4 of 8 threads) Furmark AND Fluid mark, all at the Same time!! Only way to know if your PSU is up to the task.
Watch your Temps!!

Another thought....your PSU ..is 850 w but can it handle the new card..IE: the Amps are high enough on the 12 volt rail?

Right,
So the moment I start the Furmark burn-in test, the driver crashes.

What's next?
Should I return the card to Amazon for a replacement?

I have no idea how am I supposed to test the amps o my PSU...

Cosidering this card is replacing a situation where you were running a pair of 4650s...nah let's not bother trouble shooting the power supply, I bet its fine. Unfortunately Starcraft 2 isn't a really good stress tester so its explainable why it would function while the furmark and Skyrim would not, so we're left with what looks like indeed a faulty card unfortunately. I'd contact Amazon and see if they'll do a replacement (or just look up what their terms of service are like for that, they may just refer you straight to the manufacturer which is fine as well). Btw if you haven't had to do what's known as an RMA before (the process of getting a manufacturer to replace something under warranty) I've loved taking advantage of any that offer advance RMA. Basically how it works is you'll give them a credit card's info as collateral but they send you the replacement *first* and then you send the dead one back in the packaging the replacement had come in. Its sweet, much better then sending off your own guy in whatever hap-hazard shipping method you come up with and then waiting, and waiting.

Now, their support staff may want you to try a few other things with the card first before they agree its broken so be prepped to do whatever. Furmark is notorious within the GPU maker community for showing a video card's genuine top power consumption vs what they claim the top consumptions are for instance, so you may get a mixed response if you use that as your example to prove the card isn't functioning properly.

Hope it works out.

Thanks for the info.

I tried one thing though, I under-clocked my card through the catalyst manager in 5Mhz increments while running Furmark, and I manually set fans to 100%.
This actually worked when it is under-clocked by 25Mhz, so next I tried running skyrim, and VOILA - it is working.
I noticed the higher the intensity of the furmark the bigger the underclocking needs to be, so now I'm playing in windowed mode on low, because I'm afraid it will crash again.

Do you still think I should try to get a replacement, or does it indicate a different problem?
I'm so happy I can at least play...

The situation where things like Bethesda games and heavy stressers gaining stability with underclocking a video card is actually quite common. Was this card a factory over-clocked edition to start with perhaps? I would still aim to get it replaced, it shouldn't need to be slowed down from the speed the manufacturer sold it as capable of running at and they should be responsible for giving you one that can perform at that level properly. I've had to underclock a few cards throughout my gaming with Bethesda games for instance, typically they were pre-clocked by the maker and just a tiny bit too unstable at those rates to handle what this game engine needs them to be doing.

Either way, best to do this early rather then only find out (and as per murphy's law, right after the warranty expires) that it was just a sign of a failing card that only really starts to die on you down the road.