General reasons for screen lockups ????

[anjenthedog]

Hiya folks. I'm trying to get my head around a problem that's cropped up for me recently. It used to be my worst fear was inexplicable CTDs, but instead, I'm now facing inexplicable screen freezes. (frequent screen lockups)

 

So, without making this into a deep delve into my mod list, load order, etc, I figured I'd try for a less intrusive query (If that fails I don't have a prob dropping the info, just figured I'd like to cover some basics so I can "grok" things a bit better overall, instead of getting caught up in a single instance debug)

 

What, in your experience (personal or by way of posts you've read along the way), are some of the most common reasons why screen lockups occur? Personally I have no answer, since my last game before this one (2019) was FFXI back around 2008, and in all honesty, I'm an old fudd who can count the number of games I've been into since 1980 on two hands (and maybe a big toe) , so I'm not quite as versed in the whole "gaming world" as many of my youngers who grew up with this as a natural part of the universe.

 

thanks in advance.

 

 

Edited July 12, 2023 by anjenthedog
more blather

[Scrab]

These lockups happen when there isnt enough memory available

The OS will usually try to kill the affected process to avoid itself from deadlocking due to that process eating up all of the resources. In some applications, such as Skyrim, that doesnt work as its supposed to however which causes the process to simply freeze in place and never progress from the point where it has been frozen at

You can think of it as the process being stuck in time and your OS simply holding it there like it would be some big tsunami wave about to crash onto some city. Theres no going back from that other than deleting it from existence

 

Get rid of some memory hungry mods in your list, such as texture replacers or download more RAM

 

Edited July 12, 2023 by Scrab

[anjenthedog]

I'll give that a try. (sounds quite reasonable, all things considered...) Primary mem is no issue (64G) but video is definitely at a premium (6G), but I have added some quite a few 2 and 4k textures over time... maybe pushed things too far.

 

 

Edited July 12, 2023 by anjenthedog

[Tlam99]

Do not let win manage the swap. Big bottleneck.

Create a swap on your fastest disk. Make it big enough, if you got space, at least size of your ram.

 

[traison]

Screen freeze I assume implies that the image is still, no grass or water moving, but perhaps the audio (music) is playing? In my experience, CTD's are relatively simple to solve compared to freezes, especially when the freeze occurs in a drm protected application such as Skyrim.

 

I guess the short version of it is: The rendering thread stopped for one reason or another.

 

Maybe execution escaped the rendering loop because of an exception, and the exception handler did not terminate the application. Could be a bug, or something the developers didn't expect or intend. A feature they didn't finish, a feature they never ended up using thus never tested properly. The cause of something like this could be invalid or unusual game data: error in plugin, dds, nif, bsa, xma, fuz, hkx, etc. Maybe a texture file that is too big, or in a format that overflows a buffer. It could be a mod with a dll that modified the bytecode. Dangerous dlls include (but is not limited to) the Souls mods that unfreeze the UI. Mods that fix the physics at higher framerates.

 

My plan B in a stituation like this, if we assume disabling mods does not solve or otherwise change the situation, would be to get a debugger into the frozen threads. This obviously requires one to identify the frozen threads first, and considering a thread can appear frozen without being technically frozen this may be easier said than done - and this would be the easy part.

 

Edit: If you were out of ram memory, the first thing you'd see is performance drop to 1 fps. It's called a swap file, people seem to forget it exists. In fact, you may see windows yelling at you about a lack of resources before you actually run out of physical ram, a bit before the swap file starts working overtime. What happens when you fill up the swap file? I do not know, generally humans do not have the patience to get to this point - you certainly won't be playing Skyrim when you find out.

Edited July 12, 2023 by traison

[Dorabella]

42 minutes ago, anjenthedog said:

I'm now facing inexplicable screen freezes. (frequent screen lockups)

It happened to me recently and , strangely enough always with the same mods . I solved ( for now ?) Limiting graphics enhancements (ENB) and/or other . 

In the configuration panel of the game\Video , I increased to the maximum the values related to the appearance of objects, NPC , grass , and/or whatever else is possible to make it visible before time .   Whether correct or not , this allows my PC , to read and visualize in advance what should appear next , perhaps at a specific stage ( example : fighting , running movements , etc...)

 

Also , in the Crash fix I set : UseOSAllocators=1 . It might help to no , however, I noticed that the screen freeze occurred most frequently when an NPC or creature was supposed to be in place and , was absent

 

 

[anjenthedog]

1 minute ago, Tlam99 said:

Do not let win manage the swap. Big bottleneck.

Create a swap on your fastest disk. Make it big enough, if you got space, at least size of your ram.

 

Sound advise. Thanks. 

 

Been quite a while since I used a fixed swap disk (dating back to my old WInXP system). Pointers for W10?

[Tlam99]

2 minutes ago, anjenthedog said:

Pointers for

I had a problem, when win 10 managed the swap.

It happened exclusive after opening ck, or xedit, or resaver, freeze.

This seems to fill the swap and win needs to extend it. This process of extending is very slow.

 

Never a freeze after restart of pc.

I followed this up and found warnings, win swap managment, extend swap is a bottleneck.

 

Since I created a swap on fastest disk plus the entry in enb. Ini (need to find it, not on pc)

to let os allocate, no more freeze.

I have the impression, this enb tweak thingens is still 32bit and integrated in enb now.

Let me find the post of it

[anjenthedog]

59 minutes ago, traison said:

Screen freeze I assume implies that the image is still, no grass or water moving, but perhaps the audio (music) is playing? In my experience, CTD's are relatively simple to solve compared to freezes, especially when the freeze occurs in a drm protected application such as Skyrim.

 

I guess the short version of it is: The rendering thread stopped for one reason or another.

 

Maybe execution escaped the rendering loop because of an exception, and the exception handler did not terminate the application. Could be a bug, or something the developers didn't expect or intend. A feature they didn't finish, a feature they never ended up using thus never tested properly. The cause of something like this could be invalid or unusual game data: error in plugin, dds, nif, bsa, xma, fuz, hkx, etc. Maybe a texture file that is too big, or in a format that overflows a buffer. It could be a mod with a dll that modified the bytecode. Dangerous dlls include (but is not limited to) the Souls mods that unfreeze the UI. Mods that fix the physics at higher framerates.

 

My plan B in a stituation like this, if we assume disabling mods does not solve or otherwise change the situation, would be to get a debugger into the frozen threads. This obviously requires one to identify the frozen threads first, and considering a thread can appear frozen without being technically frozen this may be easier said than done - and this would be the easy part.

1) Correct. Music/voices/sounds play out for a sec (at least sometimes) but all sound stops within a few moments after the video is frozen. 

 

And understood. I'm palpably aware that the rendering system choked

 

Debuggers aren't something I'm likely to be getting into.  But yes, lockups don't usually produce much in the way of termination logs, so an inline debugger *would* be something I'd have used  back when I was more productive and in-tune with current tools. tbh, I'm pretty lost with most contemporary stuff. Although....I'm not really sure they're needed for this analysis. (EDIT: not to say that one wouldn't be "an ideal", as I used them often in the old days. I'm just an old codge lost in a new world. even the terms I encounter for half of the technicals are different than those we used to use)

 

I suspect that what Scrab suggested is exactly what's going on. I've been a bit careless with adding shiny goodies (ex: recently installed some higher K texture replacers for draugers, trolls, added a new sky/cloud mod - that looks awesome btw, etc etc). Although Tlam's advise about the swap file also has a certain sensibility to me as a general system improvement. (as would be upgrading my video card from a 6G card, but money's short in case someone thinks to suggest it)

 

 

Edited July 12, 2023 by anjenthedog

[anjenthedog]

9 minutes ago, Tlam99 said:

I had a problem, when win 10 managed the swap.

It happened exclusive after opening ck, or xedit, or resaver, freeze.

This seems to fill the swap and win needs to extend it. This process of extending is very slow.

 

Never a freeze after restart of pc.

I followed this up and found warnings, win swap managment, extend swap is a bottleneck.

 

Since I created a swap on fastest disk plus the entry in enb. Ini (need to find it, not on pc)

to let os allocate, no more freeze.

I have the impression, this enb tweak thingens is still 32bit and integrated in enb now.

Let me find the post of it

right...What I meant is pointers on how to make the swap changes. Sorry for my confused wording. I haven't done that (or had any need) since Windows XP. nvm I'll figure it out.

 

BTW, I get the idea of putting it on the fastest disk, since we want the fastest possible access times.

 

I have a 500G SSD and a 5TB conventional disk at my disposal, so it'd be the SSD.

Edited July 12, 2023 by anjenthedog

[mircislav]

19 minutes ago, anjenthedog said:

Sorry for my confused wording

If you have Win 10 add the *.exe files as exceptions in windows security (whatever it's called, I am on Win 7 right now...) 3 times: like process, folder and file. For the ENB, you can try t.ARA's ENB, it plays nicely and it's easy on GPU and CPU. Also, taking the ownership on the whole folder (or disk even) can also help.

[anjenthedog]

1 hour ago, ?????? 1627 said:

It happened to me recently and , strangely enough always with the same mods . I solved ( for now ?) Limiting graphics enhancements (ENB) and/or other . 

In the configuration panel of the game\Video , I increased to the maximum the values related to the appearance of objects, NPC , grass , and/or whatever else is possible to make it visible before time .   Whether correct or not , this allows my PC , to read and visualize in advance what should appear next , perhaps at a specific stage ( example : fighting , running movements , etc...)

 

Also , in the Crash fix I set : UseOSAllocators=1 . It might help to no , however, I noticed that the screen freeze occurred most frequently when an NPC or creature was supposed to be in place and , was absent

 

 

I don't directly use ENB, but I do have some mods that enhance the view, and did add at least one or two over the past several months (RealClouds 3.0.1 - June 3rd). And yeah, exactly...That goes to what Scrab was saying about overload. Plus a stack of 2K monster textures added only a few weeks prior.  

 

I'd like to investigate the other things you talked about, but I'm not sure which specific settings you're referring to

[anjenthedog]

26 minutes ago, mircislav said:

If you have Win 10 add the *.exe files as exceptions in windows security (whatever it's called, I am on Win 7 right now...) 3 times: like process, folder and file. For the ENB, you can try t.ARA's ENB, it plays nicely and it's easy on GPU and CPU. Also, taking the ownership on the whole folder (or disk even) can also help.

I have full admin rights and windows security is set fine. Rights aren't the issue but thanks for including that for others who might read this thread later and might *not have them (seems a common enough problem from the many threads I've read over the past 4 years).

[Tlam99]

2 minutes ago, anjenthedog said:

I don't directly use ENB

OK, I post my settings for memory enblocal.ini anyway 

 

[MEMORY]
ForceVideoMemorySize=true
VideoMemorySizeMb=10818
ExpandSystemMemoryX64=true
ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=true 
EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=false

[anjenthedog]

So....

• Insufficient primary or video memory
• windows misallocation of swap (use fixed swap on fast drive) 
• ENB (in the end either configuration, processing power or memory)
• File Rights
• ???? anything else...maybe video card settings? (of which I am utterly clueless but up-to-date on software fwiw)

Edited July 12, 2023 by anjenthedog
correection

[anjenthedog]

Sadly, it looks like I have no enblocal.ini file on my computer, so not even a passive use apparently, just various environmental mods (realwater, realclouds, etc) and general lighting utilities like  Imaginator that I've installed over time, but thanks for including it/; Might help someone, maybe me (if I ever install ENB)  later on.

 

... having said that, the values you provided look very familiar for some reason @Tlam99, even if I can't find an enblocal file

Edited July 12, 2023 by anjenthedog
because I suck at typing

[Scrab]

28 minutes ago, Tlam99 said:

OK, I post my settings for memory enblocal.ini anyway 

 

[MEMORY]
ForceVideoMemorySize=true
VideoMemorySizeMb=10818
ExpandSystemMemoryX64=true
ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=true 
EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=false

This looks like this ENBoost stuff and is utterly useless for SE

We dont have no memory cap here

[Tlam99]

10 minutes ago, Scrab said:

this ENBoost

what I learned, it's integrated. 

Do you know, if it's active or not ?

Actually, on undresses (unequipall) the response on my setup is much faster with this settings.

I do not have ENBoost installed.

[Dorabella]

55 minutes ago, anjenthedog said:

but I'm not sure which specific settings you're referring to

Menu Game \Setting\video 

 

Distance characters ;
Distance details ;
Distance Object  ;
Distance grass  ; 

 

I brought everyone up to the maximum value

 

Spoiler

 

[Scrab]

25 minutes ago, Tlam99 said:

what I learned, it's integrated. 

Do you know, if it's active or not ?

Actually, on undresses (unequipall) the response on my setup is much faster with this settings.

I do not have ENBoost installed.

ENBoost is just the ini settings you got there

P sure they arent read anymore, just ignored. Boris mentioned theres no point in this kind of support anymore

 

The speed of undress is most certainly a placebo, independent of that fix working or not

[Tlam99]

1 hour ago, Scrab said:

most certainly a placebo

Well, then I live with the placebo.

 

[anjenthedog]

2 hours ago, ?????? 1627 said:

Menu Game \Setting\video 

 

Distance characters ;
Distance details ;
Distance Object  ;
Distance grass  ; 

 

I brought everyone up to the maximum value

 

Ah... Righto!   Sorry. I was being thick and totally forgot to consider the in-game configuration screen... lol