CTD for unknown reasons

[Bloodfang]

Hello,

 

Since this morning, I'm having a lot more CTD than ever. It comes randomly : when fast travelling, just running around in the wilderness or even when I kill an enemy.

 

Here's my mod list, it's not that huge so I don't understand why it doesn't properly work.

Also when I uncheck Enhanced Light and FX, I can load my last save (because if I don't, CTD when loading the save).

 

 

 

Can someone give me a hand? ^^ I'm using HRK ENB.

[BruceWayne]

Moved to tech support.

[MikeMetal]

Sound like scripts not playing nice. Probably you uninstalled scripted mods and the game tries to find a meaning for them. Make sure the scripts folder doesn't contain any scripts you aren't aware, uninstalling mods by just removing the .esp/esm and not also removing the .pex files is worse than a full removal.

 

High res textures can also be a problem. Ugrids value higher than default (5), even worse. What's your system specs ?

[Bloodfang]

Sound like scripts not playing nice. Probably you uninstalled scripted mods and the game tries to find a meaning for them. Make sure the scripts folder doesn't contain any scripts you aren't aware, uninstalling mods by just removing the .esp/esm and not also removing the .pex files is worse than a full removal.

 

High res textures can also be a problem. Ugrids value higher than default (5), even worse. What's your system specs ?

 

Scripts? Well I have PlayerHeadtrack, Vilja and some other stuff like "activemagiceffect.pex, actor.pex, actorbase.pex, armoraddon.pex" and many others, I admit I don't remember these ones. Do you think it's the origin of my CTD ?

 

Here's my spec :

 

Windows 7 64 bits

processor : AMD Phenom II x4 840 Processor 3.20 GHz

RAM : 8,00 Go

Graphic Card : AMD Radeon HD 6700 Series

[MikeMetal]

They are SKSE scripts, and shouldn't be a reason for your ctds. Do you get crashes with other saves, or better asking, on a new character ?

 

Also what's your ugridstoloadvalue in skyrim.ini ?

[Dragonjoe69]

I'm no expert but your load order looks like it may need some adjustment f/e the mod author recommends the  water esp to load last, I would suggest downloading boss if your not using it. Some mods are very sensitive to load order , I'm running 127 plugins and have had my game ctd at startup because a mod was misplaced 1 spot in the load order  Also what is the dedicated memory on your video card and what settings are you using? I see you have the hd texture pac installed, this can cause crashes if your video card doesn't have the memory to handle it.(1 gig dedicated is recommended) You can also try uninstalling the HD texture packs and testing if this reduces the ctds. hope this helps Edit: missed the enb , most all of these are hard on performance I would suggest looking into the video capability of your system and make sure you are not pushing it too hard.

[Bloodfang]

They are SKSE scripts, and shouldn't be a reason for your ctds. Do you get crashes with other saves, or better asking, on a new character ?

 

Also what's your ugridstoloadvalue in skyrim.ini ?

 

Ok, I tried to launch a new game, but it also crashes while the script with the cart is occuring with Ralof, Ulfric and the thief.

 

I checked my skyrim.ini and to my surprise I have no line like that. What is it?

 

I'll try to load Water.esp last, but I doubt it's the reason of the problem, when I wasn't using any ENB or light mod I use to have it in any load order and it didn't affect my game.

 

EDIT: I put the line Ugrid under [General] in skyrim.ini, but it didn't fixed the issue. I'm now trying to play without Dance of Death. Maybe that's the problem because I noticed that I crashed often when killing people.

[MikeMetal]

If you don't see ugrids in skyrim, it means it's at default value already, so you're better off removing it. It's a setting to control how much stuff you'll see in high resolution around you. Basically, makes the trees, ground, buildings, actors. etc to pop up from further distances but eats a LOT of memory and makes the game unstable.

 

Well, try disable the HD mods and give another run. Sounds like your graphic card can't handle all the 2048x2048+ textures.

[Bloodfang]

seems it's not my graphic card, it can still handle the ENB and stuff. I edited some stuff in the Roaming text files and changed load order and it seems to work fine. For now at least.

But now I can kill the very same bandits that made me crash hours ago when I gave them the killing blow. So it's surprising but very good. I hope it'll stay that way.

[CGi]

Sounds more like your graphic card ran out of memory.
Run GPU-Z and have it constantly refresh the sensor data, while running Skyrim, to see if that's the case.
if your card has 2GB RAM, make sure it never exceeds a ram usage of 1.85GB (you need to take any overhead into account) and if it does, use DDSOpt or similar to optimize the textures and tell DDSOpt to shrink all texture >2048 down to 2048 dimensions.

The GPU may be powerfull enough to render everything at a decent speed, even with ENB, but if the graphic ram is full, it's full and the games simply ctds.

Not to mention, that your graphic card got a low memory bandwidth, compared to a 6900 model, so constantly loading and unloading big textures (like when running around) can cause a ctd as well (the impact of hires body textures is very underestimated).

in case you didn't have enough free system memory for the game, so windows started paging out game data, free some ram and use ENBoost. With ENBoost, you only need to have ~2.5GB of free system memory.

[Bloodfang]

Sounds more like your graphic card ran out of memory.

Run GPU-Z and have it constantly refresh the sensor data, while running Skyrim, to see if that's the case.

if your card has 2GB RAM, make sure it never exceeds a ram usage of 1.85GB (you need to take any overhead into account) and if it does, use DDSOpt or similar to optimize the textures and tell DDSOpt to shrink all texture >2048 down to 2048 dimensions.

The GPU may be powerfull enough to render everything at a decent speed, even with ENB, but if the graphic ram is full, it's full and the games simply ctds.

Not to mention, that your graphic card got a low memory bandwidth, compared to a 6900 model, so constantly loading and unloading big textures (like when running around) can cause a ctd as well (the impact of hires body textures is very underestimated).

in case you didn't have enough free system memory for the game, so windows started paging out game data, free some ram and use ENBoost. With ENBoost, you only need to have ~2.5GB of free system memory.

 

Thanks I'll keep that in mind, I still have a few CTD but much less than when I started the topic. I hope it'll stay that way until I'll get a better graphic card !

[Spyder Arachnid]

Try also using SMCO (Skyrim Mods Complex Optimizer). http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/13529/?

 

This will optimize your textures so they don't have such a haul on your system. Won't reduce the quality, so no worries there. Just point it to your Skyrim folder (Steam\SteamApps\common\Skyrim\) and click Optimize. It should help on some of your memory issues.

 

And if you're not using it yet, get BOSS. It will sort your load order automatically for you and tell you what dirty edits you have as well that need cleaning. Which brings me to TES5Edit. There is a cleaning guide for it too to help you keep your mods cleaned and avoid any crashes from dirty edits.

 

Also enable papyrus logging. That should help with narrowing down the issue of your crashes. Just run the game once, exit than run it again to get it going. Open your Skyrim.ini in your Documents, and change these lines to read what I got below:

 

[Papyrus]
bEnableLogging=1
bEnableTrace=1
bLoadDebugInformation=1

 

After doing the above, and running your game once and then exiting and running again, next time you get a crash, you can go to your Documents/Games/Skyrim/ and go to the Logs folder to read your log. It records your data and can help pinpoint what caused your crash from the last thing it was doing. If you need help decyphering it, just paste it here next time you crash and we can help ya out. Log0 will always be the most recent.

[CGi]

DDSOpt can optimize lossless as well, just reduce the compression level.
As for normal maps, as soon as compression is done, an loss in quality is inevitable.

Compression means always loss, if it's not an file archiver, but the only noticable compression loss is on normal maps, as they'll bcome more blocky, wit higher compression levels.

 

And as for BSAs: Compressing them can reduce the laod time by a good amount, but only if your got a CPU, that can uncompress in a decent amount of time.
if your HD, wher the game is installed, is fast enough (like a SSD), you can use no compression and save on CPU time.

 

if you don't look at the Papyrus logs, keep the logging disabled, as it adds to the script delay. Only enable it, if you need it.

 

Besides that: Nice find on SMCO, SpyderArachnid. Got to check this software out, as until know, i did BSA and Tex optimization with DDSOpt and BSAOpt.

[Bloodfang]

Thanks to both of you, I'll try these tips if the CTDs come back again (I hope not...)