I hadn't played Skyrim for a few weeks, but finally got around to getting a decent amount of time to play it last night. I loaded up my most recent save which put me in a building in Whiterun (The Companions HQ I think). The first thing I saw was a lot of strange artifacting where sunlight was shining through a window. A quick check around showed the 12.2 Catalyst drivers to be the likely problem. I uninstalled 12.2 and reinstalled 12.1, which cured the artifacting. The only problem is, now every time I try to the leave the building the game crashes back to desktop without any errors of any kind. I tried starting a new game and I can get as far as sitting in the prisoner cart and the introductory dialogue plays, and then the game quits to desktop at the same point every time (just after the "move the mouse to look around" screen tip appears).

Things I have tried so far:

Changing the sound to 16 bit 41khz

Disabling AA and AF and messing with v-sync

Lowering all graphics settings

Defragging the game cache

Verifying the game cache

Deleting and reinstalling the game

Deleting the save game folder.

Nothing has fixed this problem so far.


Prior to this, I had played for a few hours without a single crash. It's about six or eight weeks since I played though, so there's probably been some game and driver patches since then.

My system is E8400 @ 3GHZ, 4GB DDR3, HD6850 1GB, Windows 7 32 bit Home Premium.

Anybody have any ideas? I'm stumped as Skyrim was running really well and I had been enjoying it immensely up until I had to stop playing due to time constraints. I'm really gutted as I'm in the mood for this game and I have the time to devote to it for a few days now. I don't have any problems with BF3, CoD MW3, Tribes Ascend, Syndicate, or The Darkness 2

Are you using, or do you have the free HD Texture pack mate?

Sorry, I should have said that I have a vanilla installation of the game (with the exception of anything that Steam has added since release).

I'm not counting my chickens, but I've managed to start a new game without crashing by deleting the entire Skyrim folder from C:\Users\\My Documents\My Games and disabling the Steam Cloud synchronisation (just deleting saves didn't work so it most probably was something in the settings folder or maybe an .ini file).

I don't mind starting again as I'd forgotten loads of what went before getting to Whiterun. I just hope I can play this awesome timesink of a game now

New INI files were created with what you did mate, which can fix things like that Good luck.

Thanks!

I might be back for more help yet, but fingers crossed...

I have the same problem, down to the artifacting and crashing (particularly on changing locations like exiting buildings or arriving after fast travel). I too rolled back the latest radeon update which fixed artifacting but I can't play more than a couple minutes without crashing. I suspected my save games were corrupt so I tried starting a new game. It won't even let me do that, crashing in the same place as the OP. I've uninstalled, deleted the skyrim folder from the steam directory and reinstalled. Same problems. I've removed the skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini but still can't play. Is there anything anyone can suggest?

the Skyrim game is randomly crashing and randomly freezing in game in my copy of the game also, please fix this Bethesda.

I'm in the process of figuring out what my particular problem is. I have a radeon 6670 on a core2duo e6420 with 4gb ram. Case temps when idle are around 110F. I also have the free hd textures installed.

By selecting low graphics, I was able to play and fast travel, walk through doors, etc.

I then enabled 4x antialiasing and I continued to be able to play (thank god).

I then set the texture detail to high and was able to fast travel once, but the second time crashed to desktop.

I then set texture quality to medium, played for a bit, fast traveled around and was ok...

Next I raised object fade from 2 to 5, light fade from 2 to 5, actor fade from 2 to 5, grass fade from 0 to 2, specularity fade from 2 to 5 and item fade from 1 to 3. This also seemed to be stable.

Anisotropic filtering was then raised from Off to 4 samples. The game stayed stable.

I raised decal quantity to Medium from None and set the water to reflect land and trees - reflect sky was already enabled. I then made sure to fast travel to an area with water and back several times. Again, everything seems stable.

Next I tried raising texture detail to High once again (from Medium). At this point it choked and crashed to the desktop on the second fast travel. Setting texture quality back to Medium appeared to work.

At this point I'm just glad I can play again. Hopefully this helps someone to figure out what the problem is and get it fixed. I've got 34 levels with textures set to High, I don't see why it should suddenly have to step down in order to be stable.

@ ansong...

its a simple matter of running out of ram....you have 4 GB when the game eats that your done. Especially if your not using a 64 bit OS because 32 bit can only have 3 GB...

I had artifacts until I turned off the AA in the Skyrim Launcher, and just turned it on using the CCC. My game is still crashing like crazy, but no artifacts!

I guess it's off to ME3 until the next patch or newer ATI drivers.

Try using CCleaner and cleaning your registry....make sure to make a backup when it prompts you first.

You mentioned that you were in the companion's building... What quest were you on? I know it sounds strange, but I was experiencing almost the same problem. Skjor had given me a quest to retrieve a sword from a giant's camp (before accepting me into the inner circle). I performed the quest, went to turn it in and ~every~ time I turned in the quest (i tried like 5 times), the game would immediately crash to desktop as soon as dialogue was done. I ended up needing to use console commands to auto complete the quest in order to continue. I wasn't awarded gold for the quest, but the companion questline line continued past that with no more issues.

On the ATI issues, I sympathize... I'm currently wrestling with a new issue where Skyrim only gets past the Bethesda logo before crashing to Desktop. I have yet to fully try everything I've found (cause I'm still solution seeking) but I've so far found these items:

Here in this forum is someone addressing the 12.2 catalyst problems and suggesting a work-around http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1359165-having-graphics-issues-lately-ati-card/

Here's something from AMD.com telling how to uninstall graphics drivers (cause the aforementioned thread suggests deleting the CCC, but there's no options for it and control panel add/remove programs listing won't give the uninstall option) http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU57RemoveOldGraphicsDrivers.aspx

If anyone else wants to advise me on this, I'll give the details:

Problem: Game will not load past the Bethesda logo. As soon as the Skyrim logo would normally show, the game crashes to desktop.

Platform: PC, Windows 7 pro, 64 bit

Card: ATI Radeon HD 5670

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600

RAM: 4 gb

Connect via Steam

The only thing I can still think of that ~may~ have fudged this for me is that the other night I had finally decided to try playing Aliens vs Predator (the newest version) and steam popped up with 3 options "play avp, play avp (direct x 11), play avp (direct x 9)" and i assumed I was on X11, so i chose that. No problems. No other games seem to be having issues.... except Skyrim :/

SKJOR is the most bugged fail NPC in the game >.< I ousted him using the Civil War on purpose.

Ya you could have every game that was released the past year and the year before running on Ultra and still have Skyrim issues. The penultimate eater of systems and killer of fun.

I'd agree with you except that I had the HD textures installed and running using the "high" setting since I started the game. I don't know what happened but for some reason, the high texture setting became unavailable to me. Maybe it was a bug where it said I was running textures at high when I wasn't and when that got fixed, the PC couldn't handle it.