Hello

Is there a way to bypass the purple textures problem? after a few hours of gameplay, I get purple textures on every custom NPC/creature and it's really annoying. Might it be a memory problem?

It's a known bug? I noticed in my game that log piles turn purple from time to time. I assumed it's just me messing up something with the textures and their normal map is showing for some reason but was never able to find the culprit. :/

I think it's because you have too little memory (video memory - VRAM).

OR... the reason could be because archive invalidation is needed. Purple textures were a common "problem" in Oblivion and the way to resolve it was archive invalidation. Now, people assume archive invalidation isn't needed in Skyrim, but no one is 100 % sure. If memory is not the cause, purple textures could be related to that the game can't find the textures... and thus archive invalidation would be needed.

Do you crash soon afterwards? Because that happened to me until Beth made the executable LAA in a patch. So yeah, it's probably a memory issue that can't be solved any other way than somehow reducing the amount of memory the game uses.

If you have the high-res textures DLC the purple logs is because Beth screwed up labeling some of the textures in there. There are some fixes floating around.

Not all the time, the problem goes away when I restart the game.

Ah I figured I messed something up, but I do use their high-res textures. Thanks.

Sounds like memory-related. When you restart the game the memory is uhm... "new" or whatever you say to explain it.
If you have a weak/mediocre GPU, you should try to remove any high res texture mods, turn off AA and AF, make sure ugridstoload=5, etc...

I have 3.5GB RAM.


I've tried that, and it turned my game to red. Never again.

What about VRAM? (The amount of memory on your videocard)

2414 MB

3.5 GB means that your PC has maybe 2 GB for game playing, Windows and background applications can eat more than half of your total RAM. If you can, upgrade your RAM to @ 6GB this should allow you a lot more playing time.

Every time I see this problem (Purple or Black textures) it has turned out to be a memory problem, and the mod user just cramming their machine with resources their machine cannot handle, DLC + every mod I fancy = Machine go pop. The DLC textures being a common factor.

Anyway, to be sure, here's a very useful tool - http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/6491, it has one problem trying to display FPS in game for those with ATI Graphics, the rest of it works fine for them though. For NVidia users its brilliant.

It will give you loads of stats of your game session, including RAM and VRAM usage. So you will see if you are topping up your machines memory limits with excessive amounts of Textures, meshes, sounds etc. I am running the current beta, testing my mod with other mods textures in game on High game Texture setting, and doing that comfortably with only 256 meg of VRAM in my laptop (minimum spec for the game is 512), always having circa 40-90 meg of VRAM to spare, with an occasional load spike taking me up to just under 250mb used

If the graph for you with either RAM use or VRAM use is flat-lining at your upper memory limit for either, that will be a good area to try and reduce and find out what is filling your machine up and causing bottlenecks in data transfer between parts of your computer.