Oblivion lockups...

[_33]

I get frequent lockups on the game TES4:Oblivion. At first I wasn't sure as a friend of mine said it's very buggy and often hangs on his system. I installed the version 1.1 update and I was able to play for a solid 45 minutes, then ..... hang!

I know my system is stable with all the other games. But I felt the side pannel of my comp quite hot near the graphics card. Could it be that Oblivion ABUSES my graphics card to the point of overheating? Anyone else have that problem?

I've got a X800GTO2 with original cooling + extra 70mm CPU fan cooling the graphics card from the case side wall towards inside. I'll try with the card at even lower clocks....

[mchutch]

I think the side fan you have is blowing in the wrong direction. I would have the side fan taking the hot air off your GFX card and out of the tower. You should also have a front intake fan blowing cool air into the tower, preferrably in the direction of the GFX card. Since I have done that, I have played Oblivion for HOURS at a time, for weeks without error or freezing.

[_33]

I think the side fan you have is blowing in the wrong direction. I would have the side fan taking the hot air off your GFX card and out of the tower. You should also have a front intake fan blowing cool air into the tower, preferrably in the direction of the GFX card. Since I have done that, I have played Oblivion for HOURS at a time, for weeks without error or freezing.

Well EVERY fan on the planet that cools a CPU pushes cool air on the cpu. But, I'll try to take hor air out of the box with a side vent, see how that will work. But Oblivion still crashes with the side panel slightly open. I just came back from a lockup. I had my GPU lowered to 490 mhz from 510. At 510mhz, I play every other game without lockups.

Did you patch your Oblivion to 1.1 ? Any mods?

[KennyT772]

it should blow twoards ur gpu. just fire up atitool while oblivion is running and check temps.

[_33]

it should blow twoards ur gpu. just fire up atitool while oblivion is running and check temps.

Actually, I have 2 side fans. One is upper towards the cpu. The other one is on the side of the PCI cards. So I did like mchutch suggested and reverse that one, pulling hot air out of the box there. And it did work. The overall temp of all components in the box lowered about 2 - 3 degrees! I have a rear vent but it's not very powerful and the rear grill is blocking a little and I havent removed that yet but plan to do.

I used to have lockups in some instances in games when I had bad coioling going on. But this oblivion brings back that problem. Seems to make my system super hot! No menchmark ever did that as bad as oblivion is. I'm lowering CPU speed, see if that will help. I just came back again from a lockup, after like 1 hour of gameplay. Lost 30 mins of the Nord village after a good night sleep :(.... I killed a couple ghosts and did a lot of good deals and worked on my persuasion skills too .... oh well...

[KennyT772]

just remember to his f5 every five minutes or so ;) and well that sounds like you dont have a very strong fan at all. could ya post a pic of your case?

[i_am_mustang_man]

for me, oblivion runs my card hotter than any other game (i don't know how, my card should be pushing at full bore all the time, it's not getting any breaks from fear), around 3-6 degrees C hotter. i haven't had any issues with it, but maybe that's what's going on for you.

to check your max temps, make sure ati tool is logging temps, and in the settings menu go to temp monitoring, and look at the max temp after playing oblivion. quit ati tool, restart ati tool, and then play another one of your games, and check the max temp in the settings/temp monitoring again. this will show you if it's an oblivion induced heat problem, or maybe something else?

[trog100]

oblivion is unstable.. it throws me out to the desktop whenever it feels like it.. it does it on both my machines.. there is nothing worng with either of em..

the problem is oblivion on some systems.. i have tried many ways to alter it and nothing i have done has made the slightest difference..

i have lost interest in the game now but its buggy and unstable.. the patch by the way made no difference..

trog

[_33]

Well lucky for me wasn't working yesterday and going to work just in couple hours. Well....... I played Oblivion all night till 6:30AM this morning! Absolutely no lockups or crashes. All night long I jumped from Level 1 to Level 5 now and have increased a lot of dexterity, persuasion skills. I now have a horse and completed a couple of missions. It's an incredible game!!!

Last night it was quite cool outside so I left the windows opened and the room temp was a steady 24°c. I lowered my core temp to 2790mhz (from usual 2820mhz) and my GPU temp (from usual 510mhz) to 480mhz. I left the GPU memory at 580mhz.

When I stopped the game the GPU was around 58°c and my CPU around 42°c. So I'd say the reason Oblivion locked on me was mostly a question of overheating. Thoe, one of my friends is also an all time Oblivion fan and he did say to me the game crashes and even that he lost a savegame once because it crashed and corrupted his save game file...

I'll have to buy a guide for this game, it's totally huge and I still don't have the ingame map!

[_33]

OK bought the quite inexpensive guide (380+ pages in color, 8 1/2 by 11).

Anyway, it locked on me today from overheat! Temperature was close to 30°c room temp, 80% humidity, and so the system came back from a crash with all high temps. The crash was intense, the screen went blank and at the same time sound cut to a horrid loud distortion from left speaker... I turned it off and robooted.

Sad sad...

[trog100]

it dosnt seem to be able to load data stably on my two systems.. both have an abit ax8 mobo.. both have ati cards and amd cpus..

it could sometimes play for hours sometimes throw me out to the desktop three times in five minutes.. it never locked the system and just needed a game reload.. but it was a pain in the arse.. he he

i tried pretty much everything on the planet to get to the bottom of it but could never alter the problem..

it plays okay for some folks and not for others.. nice game thow..

my horse died on me.. never bought another one cos by the time it died i could run faster than the bloody horse anyways.. he he...

trog

[_33]

OK I tweaked Oblivion a lot. It's at a level that I somewhat feel comfortable with. I have a pretty wide FOV with the trees and grass, personas, objects, etc showing up at far distances. Trees show up at distant mountains. The water is much improved. Most shadow effects are enabled. And it's tweaked for speed. I also installed all the visual bling bling effects that could fit on my 256 MB X800 series card.

So I decided: "Hey, let someone else try it out!". I think my ini file is quite nice and really gets as much as I could from graphics in Oblivion. if you foudn improvements to the INI without breaking some stuff, feel free please! I'm craving for improved graphics! :p

[KraezeTech]

I used to get lock-ups, get thrown to the desktop and whatnot. I read on some random forum, oblivion doesn't like overclocking, i suspect cos it drives a system so hard it makes easy work of any instability that comes with overclocking. Atm, its 15C in my room; i have a Zalman VF900-Cu fan on the Gfx card; plus Two 120mm artic cooling fans blowing @ approx 2800rpm into the side of the case. Temps are 46C for gpu core & 26C for ambient for my 6800 Ultra idle, CPU runs at 22C Oc'ed idle. I still get the crashes even with the damn patch....the dramas go on for everyone. The game runs endlessly on or close to stock speeds.

[trog100]

i even underclocked my systems in an attempt to cure the crashing out to desktop problems.. underclock or overclock it didnt make the slightest difference..

in fact nothing at all i tried and i tried everything i could think of.. made the slightest difference..

when someone says a game is sensitive to overclocking thats just another way of saying its unstable.. he he he

and if slowing the systen down cures the instability problem that just means the system itself isnt really stable at the faster speeds..

the problem i had was a simple data loading one.. instead of the loading screen appearing when changeing locations or just when new area textures needed loading i got the instant desktop.. i got around it by regular quick saves.. but it was annoying and from my point of view totally uncurable on both my systems..

trog

[_33]

you know what? I'm wuite lucky now. I found some areas of improvements to make the game work with no lockups. It depends on the room temp. But at 25°c I can run my overclocked rig with the card at 490mhz/580mhz and my CPU at 2.8ghz even and I get absolutely no lockups. If the room temp is 28°c, it might lock. In such case I lower GPU proc to 480-485mhz, but that's it.

At 20°c I can run my overclocked rig at 510/580 GFX and 2.82ghz processor.

This game is wicked. My 60+ year old father is now playing this game! This is the first computer game my fater ever plays. I'm quite surprized. He doesn't like the the rats thoe. So funny. But now I'm at Level 15 and got a number of missions done. The dungeons repopulate super fast... Annoying.