[Mizz.Jayy]

Continued from the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1301174-any-chance-of-a-fix-for-the-hard-pc-crashes-soon/

PREFACE:

Three FOUR things to note about this issue before I continue.

• This is not a thread about crashes to the desktop.
  
• This is not a thread about crashes to the desktop.
  
• This is not a thread about the main menu not appearing when you start the game.
  
• If you are experiencing this problem, DO NOT mess with your hardware trying to get around it. Unless you are 100% SURE of what you are doing, at best you'll do nothing good, at worst you'll cause irreparable damage to your system. The problem is not your computer. The problem is the game.

Symptoms:

I and a fistful of other players have been experiencing this problem since day one. At totally random times during gameplay:

• The screen will turn black without warning, with sound/music continuing in the background.
  
• Monitor gives a 'no signal' message like it would if the PC were switched off.
  
• Sound freezes and begins looping. At this point the PC has completely hung and the only way forward is to shut the power off and reboot the PC.

Demonstration and prior correspondence:

There are available a few videos on youtube which demonstrate this problem, one of which is here. There is a very, very long thread about this on the Nexus forums, located here.

Observations based on my own, and other peoples' reports:

• The game is causing the video driver to crash (black screen). Afterwards, the driver attempts to recover but fails, causing a hard hang (when the sound cuts out)
  
• (Confirmed on 06/12/2011 in this post.)
  
• Above point furthere confirmed here: "Bug check code usually is 0x00000116 which is "VIDEO_TDR_ERROR", meaning gpu recovery failed. When WDDM tries to reset the gpu, it fails and causes BSOD."
  
• There is a Blue Screen Of Death occurring when the sound cuts, however most people will not see it as they've already completely lost video output.
  
• There is no strict correlation between what the player is doing and how often the crashes occur.
  
• The crashes have been reported to occur anywhere between several hours of play to within seconds of starting.
  
• It seems to be mostly affecting ATI HD5xxx and 6xxx chips, but Nvidia users are also reporting the issue. (I have an HD6950 card myself)
  
• Both desktops and mobile systems are affected.
  
• Some (including myself) have reported the problem seems to happen at moments such as switching to the map, viewing the main menu/quest journal, or riding a horse -- however it also happens at random during normal gameplay.
  
• Some hypotheses suggest the problem lies either in the engine duping the card into entering some kind of powersave mode and then not switching back, or that Flash middleware used for rendering the menus (if there actually is a Flash binary blob in there that's used for the game's UI) is crashing the video driver.
  
• The problem has been there since version 1.0 and is still present as of 1.3.10.
  
• Video card temperatures are NOT a factor. This occurs when the GPU is at regular operating temperature, and also occurs on underclocked cards. There are no other common symptoms present before the crash - there are no artifacts on screen or the like. The crashes come out of nowhere with no apparent signs beforehand.
  
• Nobody has been able to reproduce these crashes in any other game, stress test application or any other general application of any kind.
  
• Both x86 and x64 systems are affected.

Measures people have tried taking to address the problem:

• The sound fix (before the 1.2 patch came out)
  
• Underclocking/overclocking.
  
• Reinstalling Skyrim.
  
• Lowering/raising graphics settings.
  
• Turning off background applications.
  
• Changing 'Catalyst AI' settings.
  
• Updating video drivers to newer, older, or beta versions.
  
• The 4GB fix.
  
• Enabling/disabling Crossfire.
  
• Running in windowed mode.
  
• Contacting gamesas support. (most reports say that the techs who responded either asked for peoples' dxdiag info or suggested the 44khz sound thing. The technicians I dealt with, after extensive back-and-forth conversation, were extra patient with me and eventually admitted that they'd run out of ideas.)
  
• Boris Vorontsov's ENB Antifreeze Skyrim mod. (some people have reported success with this. I am not one)
  
• Increasing the DWORD TdrDelay in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers from its default 2 to a higher value, giving more time for the game/driver to recover. (doing this increases the delay between losing video and hard freeze, but does not avoid it)
  
• Disabling desktop composition (eg. 'Aero') and themes.

Measures people have taken that were probably never going to help anyway:

• Reformatting, reinstalling Windows.
  
• Defragging.
  
• Messing with manual clock speeds in MSI Afterburner and similar applications.
  
• Switching between legitimate and pirated versions of Skyrim.
  
• Turning on/off firewalls, anti-virus programs.
  
• Changing power saving settings on the PC.
  
• Reinstalling/rolling back DirectX versions.
  
• Verifying game integrity via Steam.
  
• Messing with various BIOS settings.
  
• Messed with both skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini files to disable vsync, etc.
  
• Running chkdsk.
  
• Disabling gamepad via ini files and the in-game menus.
  
• Adding different performance-related .dll files to the Skyrim game dir.
  
• Reformatting the entire drive and starting over.
  
• Opening the computer and blasting it with an air compressor to clean it of cobwebs, dust bunnies, dead rodents etc.
  
• Messing with processor affinity settings in the task manager.
  
• Running as administrator.
  
• Running in compatibility modes (XP, Vista, etc.)
  
• Running virtualised under Windows 7's XP Mode.
  
• Deleting any and all mods installed.
  
• Swapping out the Steam-ified TES4.exe for the pre-patch version.
  
• Playing online, playing offline.
  
• Sacrificing babies of various lineage in blood rituals.

I'm just hoping to get this to the developers' attention if at all possible, since there was the announcement made that these forums will be monitored following the 1.2 patch's release. I'm not really expecting a direct response from the dev team as I know a single response from a developer in a thread on here would open the floodgates for everyone to start going nuts about everything else that plagues them as well, but I and many others have our collective fingers crossed that by the time 1.3 comes around, we'll actually be able to play this wonderful game for an extended period of time without having to hard reset our PCs every half-hour or so, potentially endangering our expensive shiny hardware.

Is it true that the tech support folks are now saying this will be patched in the next update? Or am I just reading it that way?

[Britney Lopez]

Is it true that the tech support folks are now saying this will be patched in the next update? Or am I just reading it that way?

Where do you read that?

[^_^]

Continued from the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1301174-any-chance-of-a-fix-for-the-hard-pc-crashes-soon/


Is it true that the tech support folks are now saying this will be patched in the next update? Or am I just reading it that way?

Highly doubtful. Bethseda pretty much labels the PC version as a "second thought". Excluding digit sales, skyrim PC only accounted for 10% of the sales(PC digital sales was a lot but we have no information on the numbers). They aren't going to be putting much effort into fixing this. I even saw somewhere where one of Bethseda's PR guys said PC was the minority and only a small minority of the people are experiencing hard resets. I've checked on various forums and most of them with a skyrim section have a hard crash/reset thread with at least 10 pages, one of the forums (nexus) has 100+ pages. Theres quite a bit of people with this issue, but not enough for bethseda to care about.

[Cheryl Rice]

As I've already said in the last thread: since only very few people are affected by this problem (compare the number of people complaining here to the number of people buying and playing this game!) and the nature of the problem (a game, by default, should not be able to crash the driver or the system), it's highly unlikely that this can be fixed with a patch of the game.

I even doubt that Bethesda is able to reproduce the problem, which would be the first step for finding a workaround (I don't call it bugfix, because it's likely not even a bug in the game).

It's much more likely that a fixed driver (for the gfx card or even the sound chip) would fix the problem, if it's not even just related to a common hardware conflict, which just can't be solved with software.

[Kieren Thomson]

As I've already said in the last thread: since only very few people are affected by this problem (compare the number of people complaining here to the number of people buying and playing this game!) and the nature of the problem (a game, by default, should not be able to crash the driver or the system), it's highly unlikely that this can be fixed with a patch of the game.

I even doubt that Bethesda is able to reproduce the problem, which would be the first step for finding a workaround (I don't call it bugfix, because it's likely not even a bug in the game).

It's much more likely that a fixed driver (for the gfx card or even the sound chip) would fix the problem, if it's not even just related to a common hardware conflict, which just can't be solved with software.

Your partially correct but partially incorrect. Quite a bit of the people who are suffering from this is due to graphical related errors, mostly caused by drivers(others it is an issue with bad hardware like gpu, psu,etc... but those people are the minority here). It largely depends on the card, the OS, and whats installed on each person's computer (directx versions, etc...) and even the combination of hardware. You could look at it two ways, radeon and nvidia need to release drivers to solve the instability in various games. Or the developers of the games need to track down the issues in their game and patch it up on their end. Companies like Blizzard would work extensively getting the game to be stable on all computers. Companies like Bethseda (who have had a TERRIBLE track record recently with rage and fallout NV with instability) and Trion will just shrug it off and be slightly hopeful that nvidia and radeon will get the people to stop complaining. If bethseda honestly tried they could have tracked down all of the CTD and hard crash problems on PC, but PC is just a port that they aren't giving much thought to it. So these are kind of like bugs depending on how you look at it, it just depends on who you think should take responsibility in fixing it.

[Mizz.Jayy]

Don't confuse instability of the game (crashes to desktop, or quest bugs) with driver or system related instability. Bethesda might have a bad track record regarding the stability of their games (I'd even challenge that reputation...), but you just can't blame them for a system crash.

Again, a bug in a game should be able to cause the system (not the game!) to crash! If the system crashes, there is definitely something wrong with the system (and I see the drivers as a part of the system, too)!

[Jaki Birch]

Symptoms:

I and a fistful of other players have been experiencing this problem since day one. At totally random times during gameplay:

* The screen will turn black without warning, with sound/music continuing in the background.
* Monitor gives a 'no signal' message like it would if the PC were switched off.
* Sound freezes and begins looping. At this point the PC has completely hung and the only way forward is to shut the power off and reboot the PC.

Same as always with that symptom, the first thing to look at is the power supply, since what's happened (usually) is the current needed by the graphics card has dropped too low for it to run, so it shut itself down. I just don't see anyone in this thread paying attention to that very common reason for the symptom.

[hannah sillery]

Same as always with that symptom, the first thing to look at is the power supply, since what's happened (usually) is the current needed by the graphics card has dropped too low for it to run, so it shut itself down. I just don't see anyone in this thread paying attention to that very common reason for the symptom.

I'm using a quality 600w psu that's more than capable of supplying enough power to the system. I have only encountered this problem when entering caves with heavy ice/snow. Maybe it's an issue with the shaders they use bringing up a very common but hidden Radeon hardware bug. But then again Nvidia users have reported this problem too. So the least common denominator is the game engine, not even the drivers.

[Sarah Evason]

You may be on to something with ice and snow - ice magic seems to trigger it for me.

It has always happened in big fights with NPCs throwing a lot of magic about and then last week I was on a mages guild quest that required me to fire an ice spell. First time I fired the spell it black screened. After the reboot I went in and on the third ice spell again a crash. It has also crashed in a dragon fight when the dragon was using frost magic on me.

[Sasha Brown]

You missed a measure, a solution that I have posted here before. Turning off SLI works for me in all games that exhibit B(lack)SOD's.

BTW Gorath I have a 1200W Silverstone PSU. Power probs? Not the PSU!

[Isabella X]

You may be on to something with ice and snow - ice magic seems to trigger it for me.

It has always happened in big fights with NPCs throwing a lot of magic about and then last week I was on a mages guild quest that required me to fire an ice spell. First time I fired the spell it black screened. After the reboot I went in and on the third ice spell again a crash. It has also crashed in a dragon fight when the dragon was using frost magic on me.

the only time i can force a black screen crash is firing a fire spell into a mist cloud in the marshes.

you can see the pc grind to a halt like an over wound clock,tick tick...................tick crash!


and this happens at every setting with drivers or ini settings and at every graphical setting from low to high..

[Sabrina garzotto]

Well, guys, if you think that Bethesda is just that bad and you don't like their products, there is a very simple solution: Never buy any of their games anymore!

Actually noone will lose any sleep over that.

I just wanted to give some reasonable advice. As I know a bit how a computer works, I often find it hard to accept what people are writing in these forums and who is blamed for what. But actually, it's quite pointless to want to change that, because there are only two things which are truly infinite: the universe and human stupidity.

[Penny Flame]

the only time i can force a black screen crash is firing a fire spell into a mist cloud in the marshes.

you can see the pc grind to a halt like an over wound clock,tick tick...................tick crash!


and this happens at every setting with drivers or ini settings and at every graphical setting from low to high..

Hmm which OS do u use? 32 bit or 64 bit, i know the game is 32 bit but who knows, am curious

Edit @ moderators

If u edit a thread do it unbiased pls and not only for one party... be objective ; ) )

[leni]

I was having stutters and hard lockups in the game. Prior to 1.2, the ENB Mod helped. I never allowed the game to go to 1.2. However, since 1.3 and without the ENB Mod the game has been smooth and stable for me.

Ice as some have noticed will slow down FPS, but that is a Light Source issue more than anything else.

[Penny Wills]

Hmm which OS do u use? 32 bit or 64 bit, i know the game is 32 bit but who knows, am curious

Edit @ moderators

If u edit a thread do it unbiased pls and not only for one party... be objective ; ) )

tried >

dual boot win 7 ultimate and win xp pro

on 3 types of drive,ide/ssd and sata

with 3 different cards[gt520/hd4870/hd6870

with every driver set from 8.5 on

with 2 types of mem ddr2 and ddr3 1033 - 1600

1 cpu x4 945be

and the only way this game will run without the system shutdown is with the gt520
of course i still get the game bugs [you know the ones the fans dont seem to get]
but playing the game is possible.

the root of all woes is bethesda doesnt talk to amd,OR amd doesnt talk to bethesda.

[how solid]

I have not been able to play this game at all since just under a week ago. I had logged in 17 hours with no problems and then one day I log in and enter a cave and then it freezes and then goes to a black screen. After that I can't do anything except restart my pc. I've tried several times since then to play and even tried differen't save points and everytime it freezes in less than 3 seconds and then the screen goes black. I also ran the game integrity check from steam and that didn't help either. I don't understand what happened but it's ridiculous.

[Chloe Lou]

I have not been able to play this game at all since just under a week ago. I had logged in 17 hours with no problems and then one day I log in and enter a cave and then it freezes and then goes to a black screen. After that I can't do anything except restart my pc. I've tried several times since then to play and even tried differen't save points and everytime it freezes in less than 3 seconds and then the screen goes black. I also ran the game integrity check from steam and that didn't help either. I don't understand what happened but it's ridiculous.

AMD/ATI = welcome to the club

NVIDIA = 4gb launcher and ENB fix or rollback to 1.1

[Adam]

tried >

dual boot win 7 ultimate and win xp pro

on 3 types of drive,ide/ssd and sata

with 3 different cards[gt520/hd4870/hd6870

with every driver set from 8.5 on

with 2 types of mem ddr2 and ddr3 1033 - 1600

1 cpu x4 945be

and the only way this game will run without the system shutdown is with the gt520
of course i still get the game bugs [you know the ones the fans dont seem to get]
but playing the game is possible.

the root of all woes is bethesda doesnt talk to amd,OR amd doesnt talk to bethesda.

Yes than only one factor is left and that would be badtesdas unoptimization on computer hardware. As i recall even the PS3 was suffering from freezes when advancing thru the game over 40 hours...

[Breanna Van Dijk]

Don't confuse instability of the game (crashes to desktop, or quest bugs) with driver or system related instability. Bethesda might have a bad track record regarding the stability of their games (I'd even challenge that reputation...), but you just can't blame them for a system crash.

Again, a bug in a game should be able to cause the system (not the game!) to crash! If the system crashes, there is definitely something wrong with the system (and I see the drivers as a part of the system, too)!

Actually, I could program a game that could hard crash certain systems and not others and it would be something that nvidia and or radeon could fix with their drivers. Its actually quite easy if you know what your trying to do exactly. My system is completely stable. I have run prime95, memtest86, and furmark, for countless hours (and I ran prime95 and furmark at the same time) and no issues with voltages or temperatures. I have checked my harddrive (no errors on 3 different r/w tests). I have disabled my sound card for skyrim(didn't do anything). I bought a new PSU thats in perfectly working order(bought it in part for skyrim because I wasn't sure if my PSU was causing the errors... also bought it because its modularized). So far, the only thing that is wrong is skyrim no matter what I do. I have not swapped out the motherboard because I don't have a spare motherboard and I am not going to buy a new motherboard just to see if skyrim works on it (there is no signs of motherboard issues). Everything is checking out. I have tried skyrim on 3 separate OSs, two seperate windows 7 digital downloads (one from river digital, the other from msdnaa), windows xp, and ubuntu (now that was annoying to set up lmao). The point I made with all that? Its not my [censored] hardware and its got a low chance of being the os/software, its an issue with skyrim/drivers!

Do I mean that all hard crashes have to do with that? NO. Theres people that need to buy better PSUs. Theres people that need to clean out the dust from their computer. Theres people that have faulty hardware. But those issues would cause problems during the stress testing. Theres also issues with registry problems and random stuff like that that people can fix their hard crashes with.

Now I am actually a software engineer. Writing code is what pretty much what I do. The only thing I could see wrong in my particular situation is that skyrim is not written optimally for my system configuration(I'm not surprised seeing as they ported this from ps3/xbox) e.g. it hard crashes every 2 minutes. Now, I'm not sure, perhaps its some sort of combination of my graphics card type and my chipset, but could also be several combinations. There are two ways that my hard crash could be resolved: 1, bethseda can patch up the game so my system and its drivers will work properly. 2, the driver developers can figure out that skyrim is not working with my system and modify the drivers to work properly with skyrim. Currently neither "side" is doing a thing.

Software that causes system crashes are rare which is why its hard for you to understand that it can be considered a software bug, very few software out there these days have such issues because programming standards are quite high these days, also most games do extensive alpha and beta testing on NUMEROUS system configurations, bethseda (as well as a few other companies) doesn't really do that.

[mimi_lys]

AMD/ATI = welcome to the club

NVIDIA = 4gb launcher and ENB fix or rollback to 1.1

I admittedly have an older machine but, everything was working fine until several days ago. I have a intel core 2 quad q6600 2.40 ghz with 4g ram and 32 bit vista os. So I believe it only recognizes 3.2g of ram or so. And my video card is a nvidia 8800gt. The game was running with no problems at all on low settings. I would rollback to 1.1 if I knew how. I tried reloading the game through steam and turning off the automatic updates but I still ended up with 1.3. I also followed a guide that claimed you could rollback to older versions of the game if you have windows 7 or vista but, that wasn't the case for me. And I'm not a computer person so there's very little I can do on my own. I also don't run any mods at all.

[Mrs Pooh]

I admittedly have an older machine but, everything was working fine until several days ago. I have a intel core 2 quad q6600 2.40 ghz with 4g ram and 32 bit vista os. So I believe it only recognizes 3.2g of ram or so. And my video card is a nvidia 8800gt. The game was running with no problems at all on low settings. I would rollback to 1.1 if I knew how. I tried reloading the game through steam and turning off the automatic updates but I still ended up with 1.3. I also followed a guide that claimed you could rollback to older versions of the game if you have windows 7 or vista but, that wasn't the case for me. And I'm not a computer person so there's very little I can do on my own. I also don't run any mods at all.

the problems are degenerative

i keep a copy of the whole game folder when its running fine.
and when it starts to act wierd for no apparent reason i copy the whole folder back,and problems dont exist.

so that proof enough the game is actually corrupting itself.
and thats a bethesda problem we cant do a thing about.

[HARDHEAD]

AMD/ATI = welcome to the club

NVIDIA = 4gb launcher and ENB fix or rollback to 1.1

Doesn't work for me. I am running a Nvidia 560Ti, Intel 2500k i5, Nvidia HDMI Audio over the card and Realtek Onboard, and 8GB RAM. Bethesda emailed me again this morning and asked me to send them a DxDiag txt file. I have not been able to and cannot play the game for the PC. It runs until I get close to or into Helgen, then it crashes. It's not my hardware or Windows or drivers, all that's updated-I built the computer a few days ago. My temperatures don't change dramatically, and my stuff isn't OC'd. I've tried every fix out there, no dice. I think Bethesda is working on it though, because seriously, I want to return my game if they don't patch this: I know my computer can handle it, it's not my fault that it doesn't. It runs fine on my 360, but I love the console and mods for the computer.

I've heard from both Ashish (level one tech support at Bethesda) and now Aravind, who I presume is level two or a QA person. I'll let you guys know what they reply, they said they'd reply soon.

[Andres Lechuga]

My system is completely stable. I have run prime95, memtest86, and furmark, for countless hours (and I ran prime95 and furmark at the same time) and no issues with voltages or temperatures. I have checked my harddrive (no errors on 3 different r/w tests). I have disabled my sound card for skyrim(didn't do anything). I bought a new PSU thats in perfectly working order(bought it in part for skyrim because I wasn't sure if my PSU was causing the errors... also bought it because its modularized). So far, the only thing that is wrong is skyrim no matter what I do. I have not swapped out the motherboard because I don't have a spare motherboard and I am not going to buy a new motherboard just to see if skyrim works on it (there is no signs of motherboard issues). Everything is checking out. I have tried skyrim on 3 separate OSs, two seperate windows 7 digital downloads (one from river digital, the other from msdnaa), windows xp, and ubuntu (now that was annoying to set up lmao). The point I made with all that? Its not my [censored] hardware and its got a low chance of being the os/software, its an issue with skyrim/drivers!

There is at least one other component, you didn't swap out, which is your gfx card. In your case, I'd try to underclock the card. If that helps, you have some reinsurance that it's a faulty hardware.

I don't think it's the MB, but that would be a possibility as well.

As a software developer, you should know how unlikely it is, that they coded the game in a way that is compatible with your configuration in general (i.e. your gfx card, your sound chip and your Windows config) but not with your specific machine. That would actually be quite hard, even if they would like to do that intentionally.

And again, it's the driver crashing, not the game.

[Michael Russ]

the problems are degenerative

i keep a copy of the whole game folder when its running fine.
and when it starts to act wierd for no apparent reason i copy the whole folder back,and problems dont exist.

so that proof enough the game is actually corrupting itself.
and thats a bethesda problem we cant do a thing about.

Hmm i guess my feeling was right, it might be due to a memory bug. I think in ur case the memory is not limited so the game will after a while eat all resources without dumping the old allocated memory.

@ Grestorn

Stop being silly, if changing driver versions wont help than u practically eliminate ur well placed argument.

[Cagla Cali]

There is at least one other component, you didn't swap out, which is your gfx card. In your case, I'd try to underclock the card. If that helps, you have some reinsurance that it's a faulty hardware.

I don't think it's the MB, but that would be a possibility as well.

As a software developer, you should know how unlikely it is, that they coded the game in a way that is compatible with your configuration in general (i.e. your gfx card, your sound chip and your Windows config) but not with your specific machine. That would actually be quite hard, even if they would like to do that intentionally.

And again, it's the driver crashing, not the game.

Yes but the driver doesn't crash with any other game. The BSOD code I get is bccode116. Which is a driver failure or Directx, which means there's something Bethesda's done that upsets both ATI and Nvidia cards. If it isn't happening in any other program, the isolated program is at fault.