Nvidia GPU Driver Problems? - Skyrim SE Freezing

[bwillismusic]

Hi everybody,

Just got back into Skyrim after a long hiatus and I'm having a nightmarish time trying to diagnose this issue.

I've got a load order with around 115 mods, and I'm getting constant and hard freezes when I load my game.. No CTD's, just either hard freezes randomly after a while (so, yes, the game loads albeit only when I reinstall my existing Nvidia drivers) OR when loading into a new area I just get a black screen freeze with the sound of the cell I loaded into still playing.

When the game freezes I have to sign out of Windows 10 and sign back in to regain control of my system.

Being that these are freezes, and not CTD's, I was postulating that this may be a display driver issue. SO, I went through the process of uninstalling my current and latest NVIDIA driver (385.41) for My GTX 1070 through Display Driver Uninstaller, (as well as old fashioned registry uninstallation) and rolled back to a previous driver (382.53). Again, to no avail.

The reason I'm thinking it's a weird driver thing is because I NEVER get CTDs.. Just hard softlock freezes. Any ideas how to stop this from happening?

Has anybody else experienced these game-breaking HARD system locking freezes w/ modded Skyrim SE? I apologize for the lengthy thread, but when the game works it plays great. But the freezes are just infuriating, and reinstalling Nvidia drivers after EVERY sign/out or reboot is annoying AF.

Thanks.

System Specs:
CPU: Intel Core i5-4570 (3.2 GHz)
OS: Windows 10 (64 bit)

 

[mwryder55]

While I have had problems with Skyrim and nVidia drivers in the past, when I had crashes like you are describing they were due to a hardware problem. Do you have the same problems if you run a video benchmark like Heaven? Can you monitor your temperatures while running Skyrim to see what they are?
I had the problem with the locked computer and no display because of a problem with the power supply. Others have had similar problems with overheating.

 

[bwillismusic]

While I have had problems with Skyrim and nVidia drivers in the past, when I had crashes like you are describing they were due to a hardware problem. Do you have the same problems if you run a video benchmark like Heaven? Can you monitor your temperatures while running Skyrim to see what they are?
I had the problem with the locked computer and no display because of a problem with the power supply. Others have had similar problems with overheating.

Hey thanks for the quick reply. I just ran the heaven benchmark and I get a solid 80+ fps with nominal temps and everything runs fine as wine.. My CPU and GPU temps are also well within acceptable levels. I'm running a GTX 1070 with a corsiar 500w psu, so I'm thinking power isn't the issue. May just be Skyrim SE, and I could just have to live with the freezes..

 

[mwryder55]

The only other thing I can think of is the memory. How much do you have and have you tried to run memtest on it?

 

[Solandri]

One really weird problem I had with Skyrim was that the load screens would take a long time and glitch if I had Task Manager running. Normally a 3D model is displayed during loading, and you can use the mouse to move or rotate it. But if I had Task Manager running, model animation would freeze after a split second, and loads would sometimes take 10-15 minutes.

Have you tried running Skyrim without Task Manager and any diagnostic utilities like framerate and temp monitors running?

 

[bwillismusic]

The only other thing I can think of is the memory. How much do you have and have you tried to run memtest on it?

8 GB of DDR3. I ran memtest and there were quite a few errors (like 70) but I've heard the test can be unreliable if you don't set the mb amount correctly.. Kind of find it hard to believe that the ram is the culprit, but who knows.

I played SSE last night and sure as the sun rises, the game froze with a black screen and music still playing loading into the Blue Palace in Solitude, completely softlocked out of Win 10. Sigh... I'm thinking this is an SSE issue.

 

[mwryder55]

If you run the program without any mods does it still crash? The only reason I asked about the memory is because of the number of mods you mentioned you were loading. If you look at your memory usage in Task Manager does it show any free memory?

 

[bwillismusic]

One really weird problem I had with Skyrim was that the load screens would take a long time and glitch if I had Task Manager running. Normally a 3D model is displayed during loading, and you can use the mouse to move or rotate it. But if I had Task Manager running, model animation would freeze after a split second, and loads would sometimes take 10-15 minutes.

Have you tried running Skyrim without Task Manager and any diagnostic utilities like framerate and temp monitors running?

Yeah, I don't have anything running in the background but Mod Organizer, to start the application.

 

[bwillismusic]

If you run the program without any mods does it still crash? The only reason I asked about the memory is because of the number of mods you mentioned you were loading. If you look at your memory usage in Task Manager does it show any free memory?

I ran the game with zero mods, and I still got a black screen on startup. SSE only uses 2,500 mb of RAM when I check task manager, so there's plenty of overhead left. Thanks.

 

[bwillismusic]

If you run the program without any mods does it still crash? The only reason I asked about the memory is because of the number of mods you mentioned you were loading. If you look at your memory usage in Task Manager does it show any free memory?

I ran the game with zero mods, and I still got a black screen on startup. SSE only uses 2,500 mb of RAM when I check task manager, so there's plenty of overhead left. Thanks.

 

[mwryder55]

I know that you said you rolled back the drivers. How old were the drivers you used? About a year ago I had problems with some of the new drivers and had to use older drivers. Since then I have not had any problems, but I haven't started Skyrim Special Edition lately, so maybe one of the newer versions will cause problems again. I will try tonight and let you know.

 

[bwillismusic]

I know that you said you rolled back the drivers. How old were the drivers you used? About a year ago I had problems with some of the new drivers and had to use older drivers. Since then I have not had any problems, but I haven't started Skyrim Special Edition lately, so maybe one of the newer versions will cause problems again. I will try tonight and let you know.

Ok, so after the latest freeze, I'm starting to really think my Nvidia 1070 isn't communicating with some other piece of my computers hardware correctly. Tried to run SW Battlefront and the exact same thing happened, (a hard freeze w/ music continually playing), but this time I got a direct X 11 error that said something along the lines of "your graphics card has been physically removed. Try installing the latest graphics drivers" (this is with the latest 385.41 Nvidia drivers).

Going to try to clean install my GPU drivers and use a much older version, and see if it works, but I doubt it. My PC behaved the exact same way the last time I tried a clean reinstallation. This is f***ing so frustrating...