Absolutely surreal crashes

[Octopuss]

I don't know what happened, but my stability testing results are only getting worse and worse. I thought I just had some minor problems, resulting in occasional crashes (and it looked like it!), but since yesterday, things have gone downhill. I didn't even change anything significant like graphic drivers.

I am using vurt's stress test, and even the naked game crashes of completely freezes now (not immediatelly of course). It started happening some time during yesterday, and I repeat, I didn't make any significant changes to the PC at all. Basically, I am still only messing around with the game, MO, and ENB.

 

After my previous thread got locked, I finally figured the approach of making sure STEP only setup was stable first was a good idea, so I started testing a bit differently.

I started from pure vanilla (with just the DDSOpted vanilla+DLC+hires textures) and made my way down.

I was getting some random CTDs I couldn't reliably reproduce, but they were there. Eventually I solved it by downloading the "optimal" version of SRO. I was still using the full 2k version at that point. It didn't make any sense, because my 4GB card was barely peaking at 2,5GB then, so I am really confused how could using lower res textures help.

So I moved down the list over to landscape mods, and that looked pretty stable. I think I repeatedly managed 10mins of vurting.

The crashes (and I think an occasional freeze) started with characters and creatures, and I believe that's where I couldn't make any progress anymore. I think it could be assumed stable, but I decided I didn't want to make any compromises. The two notes I made say I first got a CTD after 8,5min, and then after 10 (I guess right before I was about to stop the game). It lasted pretty long, but it was a crash nontheless.

At that point I started experimenting with ini settings and ENB a little, but didn't get anywhere. Eventually I started moving back, and that's probably when things started to go downhill. I just couldn't get a crash-free run. I even got crashes with just the fixes category active.

 

Right now the damn game crashes or completely freezes with just the hires optimized textures. After that I only have Live another life active (so I can test), and of course I run SKSE (I don't even use the alpha). Not even the unofficial patches (it crashed with them as well). I don't get it.

I tried several things:

- reinstalled drivers 3 times and tested again both with the stable and newest beta

- switched to pure vanilla inis (they were 99% vanilla already though)

- various combinations of ENB settings (like, ExpandSystemMemoryX64, manually setting VideoMemorySizeMb, ReservedMemorySizeMb)

- completely removed ENB (that was a bad idea, because when Skyrim freezes there's no way to close it, you can't even bring Task Manager up)

 

This is a proper WTF material right there.

Edited March 28, 2014 by Octopuss

[MadWizard25]

Gratz on increasing stability    When you mention removing skyrim - textures.bsa, were you also loading the DDSoptimized textures from that bsa in MO? Just curious 

[Octopuss]

Nope, the optimized textures are loose files. I did it exactly like the DDSopt guide says.