Help with total freezes

[Nord85]

As the title suggests, I've got some problems with the game freezing totally. This happens sporadically, and involves the picture freezing completely while the music continues playing. The game responds to no key. About one time in four, pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete enables me to close the game from the control panel, but in the majority of the cases a manual restart of the PC is required.

These freezes happen almost exclusively outdoors. Particularly bad places are the Fall Forest (especially near Ivarstead), the surroundings of Riverwood, the shores of Lake Illinalta and the area near Valtheim towers, near the bridge beyond which the road forks towards Ivarstead and Windhelm. The worst offender is the volcanic wasteland between Kynesgrove and Mistwatch. There I have to save every few minutes as the game stutters horribly and a freeze can occur at any time. In most other places I get freezes quite rarely. Especially the snowy areas are very safe in this regard. Practically the only interior where a freeze sometimes happens is the Hall of the Elements. Sometimes freezes occur instantly after moving from indoors to outdoors or exiting from a city (or, in case of Riften, entering). No stutter is required for a freeze to occur, as sometimes they come out of the blue. However, stuttering seems to increase the frequency.

In general, the freezes seem mostly occur in places where there is water within sight and (except in the Eastmarch) lots of trees. The weather is most often clear when this happens, although the time of the day can be anything. So, I'm starting to think the freezes are somehow related to lighting. This is supported by the fact that some shadow tweaks I made in the .ini seem to have reduced the occurrence of the freezes. Sadly, no tweak so far has eliminated them completely.

My system specs are as follows: dual-core 3.2 Ghz processor, ATI 3870 (512 Mb), 4 Gb of RAM, a USB sound card. My mod list is irrelevant, since the freezes were there also when I played without any mods. Also, setting the graphics higher or lower seems to have a negligible effect.

I would be grateful if someone could help me with this. I'm going to test with a lighting mod if it changes anything, but an .ini tweak would be the best solution, if someone knows anything like that to cure the problem.

[Khali]

Your old video card and its low amount of video ram is the problem in this case. It just cant handle the reflections on the water nor the mists that float at ground level in those areas. You need at least 1GB of video ram to run Skyrim reliably. More would be better.

That's a pretty old computer system your using. It might be time to consider a upgrade. You can get a decent gaming system with a i5 with 8 GB of ram. Toss in a GTX 750Ti video card or better and you will be good to go for several years. I say a i5 or i7 because more and more games are making use multiple cores so you want at least a four core processor.

[Nord85]

The card might well be a reason as you say. The funny thing, though, is that it can run the game with high settings 90% of the time with decent FPS and the stuttering I mentioned is only occasional outside that one area. Still, it might well be that the particles from the fog etc periodically overload the card.

But then, I wonder why the freezes don't occur every time I visit such areas, then? Instead, they are rather random, and the mentioned circumstances only seem to make them a lot more probable. I can play for 20 hours without a freeze, then another day get two or three of them in the space of a few hours, even if I'm playing all that time within the same areas.

But in the end, you are right. I should really upgrade my PC, and will when I get enough cash.

[Varyag]

The xbox freezes too. It's like the system can't handle all things going on inside the game. Nothing you can do, but remember to save often.

[Nord85]

Update: Seems I was at least partly correct in suspecting the lighting/particles interplay as a cause for the freezes. I installed a lighting mod, which among other changes disables Bloom. The game feels like it runs even more smoothly than before, and I experienced much less stuttering when visiting the volcanic area. In fact, there was almost none. Got one freeze, though, unsurprisingly in Kynesgrove, but it was of the less annoying kind where I can Ctrl-Alt-Del out of the game. Also, there have been a few places where a freeze has been almost guaranteed on the first visit with a given character. This time nothing happened when I went to those places with my new char.

So, not a total cure, but a definite improvement. I hope this'll prove a long-term benefit. Also, it's nice to see things working as advertised. The mod maker said it may increase performance, and that's what it seems to have done.

Varyag: Do the freezes on xbox occur at the same/similar places as with my PC? If so, that could point out to a specific circumstance which causes those.

[Stingm]

What is the name of the mod? Where is it?

[Nord85]

Realistic Lighting Overhaul at Nexus. Be warned, though, that it makes many interiors and outside nights much darker. I used the modular installation and chose the "brighter dungeons" option, and they still are a bit darker than in vanilla. So, it may not be your cup of tea.

On the other hand, the mod is, well, more realistic than vanilla lighting. Dawns and dusks are longer and feel more atmospheric. Brightness depends on the weather in a greater degree than in vanilla. Fire and magic light can be seen farther away in the dark. Some locations look better with the mod and some worse, and the increased darkness makes sneaking somewhat easier. Lastly, light sources like torches are actually needful with the mod. So IMHO it's worth a try.

[Varyag]

Varyag: Do the freezes on xbox occur at the same/similar places as with my PC? If so, that could point out to a specific circumstance which causes those.

Yes, one of my characters is stuck in that volcanic march in Eastmarch (or is it Riften, not sure where the border is). He can't walk five feet without the game freezing. He is doing "The night to remember" and trying to get to the Witchmist Grove. I'm pretty sure I have to delete his save and recreate him from the start.

Yesterday, the game froze in Riften stables when the Khajit Caravan was there and then when trying to Enter Lakeview Manor.

[Nord85]

Yes, one of my characters is stuck in that volcanic march in Eastmarch (or is it Riften, not sure where the border is). He can't walk five feet without the game freezing. He is doing "The night to remember" and trying to get to the Witchmist Grove. I'm pretty sure I have to delete his save and recreate him from the start.

Yesterday, the game froze in Riften stables when the Khajit Caravan was there and then when trying to Enter Lakeview Manor.

Interesting. So, it seems that as Kali suggested, the steam rising from ground in the volcanic area could be a cause. In other freeze-happy areas there is the fog from rapids and waterfalls. Also, in the Fall Forest there are the falling leaves, which burden the GPU further. Lastly, sunshine and its reflection on water and other surfaces seems to be a contributing factor. It's indeed sure your Xbox and my GPU can't always handle that amount of stuff.

I could test this further by setting particle count in the .ini to zero. But as the freezes are rather random on my PC, I couldn't be sure if this worked even if I ran around for 20 hours without a freeze. Besides, playing that long with invisible flames and other weird stuff really doesn't appeal to me. I will, however, disable water reflections and see if that helps near water areas. How about on the Xbox? Can you tinker with graphics in any way? If so, maybe disabling reflections and Bloom/HDR lighting could help somewhat.

[Stingm]

Thanks for the reply. I will check it out.

[Varyag]

Well, I solved my redguard's problem with other way: fast traveling to Windhelm, selling loot to merchants and then fasttravelling to his home and emptying his inventory to chets. Managed to kill a dragon without freezes.

[Khali]

I decided to look into this issue myself. I am running a i5-3570k, 32GB ram, and a GTX 680 2GB video ram.

In the Badlands/volcanic area I didn't notice much until I got into a area with a lot of steam rising into the air and some good daylight. Then things started to make the video card work a bit and I could hear the fan speed up. As soon as I left that area and got into snow or pine forest things go back to normal.

I then headed down into the Rift and worked my way from Riften over to the pass to Helgen. During the night time my video card had to work a little harder but not much beyond the rest of the game. But when the sun came up things got interesting. Out in the forest with all those aspen trees and even my 680 was working hard, cooling fan had spooled up to max speed. Headed to the lake and it was still working hard. As soon as I got a way from the aspen trees and all those little leaves things cooled down and my GPU fan slowed back to idle speed.

So its a combination of lighting and particle effects from the aspen leaves and the steam/water mist in those area's that is causing your older video card and the Xbox to choke and freeze up.

[Nord85]

Yes, it must be so. That also explains why the lighting overhaul enhanced my PC's performance. Despite of that improvement I still got one freeze yesterday, in a typical situation: instantly after exiting the Sleeping Giant Inn to Riverwood. Most of the triggering factors were present: Steam from the rapids, falling pine needles, bright sunlight and change from dim interior to an exterior area.

But now that we've found the cause, there might also be a solution. Next I'll try reducing the particle count moderately (say, from 750 to 500) and installing those parts of the Performance Plus mod that reduce the graphical quality of the falling leaves and pine needles. That, of course, doesn't make my video card any better, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't at least reduce the frequency of the freezes. Since view distance and texture quality are nearly the only things I'm not willing to downgrade even for stableness, this should provide an acceptable trade-off.

Thanks for help, Khali! It was nice of you to test things out.

[Nord85]

Update 2: After installing Performance Plus and Reduced Vanilla Textures and setting particle count to 250, I can see a definite improvement in the freeze department. No freezes anywhere except in Eastmarch and Ivarstead. Even there they mostly are the variety that doesn't require rebooting the PC. The best thing is that the graphical quality has lowered only negligibly. I guess this is as good as it gets without upgrading my rig.