Doubled frame rate by starting a new game.

[decimus28]

I've been having a ton of crashes related to my 250 hour in game saves. So I started a new game to see how that would run. No crashes but my framerate overall has doubled to about 95-160. In Jemison it went from about 49 to 95-100.

From exploring planets(945) and doing all their PoI and collecting my save file size went from about 3.37MB(new game) to 73MB. Not sure if it's due to the save file bloat, the large amount of bugs that have cropped up in the 250 hour save like the no enemies on ships one, or some combination of outpost and skill point choices.

The whole reason for the newgame was to attach a debugger to Starfield and set a break point to
Starfield!agsSetDisplayMode
which apears to be a AMD GPU Service library function in Starfield that is causing my crashes(same function in over 40 minidumps). Some reason that function is being called incorrectly in my long save file but not the new one.

The code is trying to do this by the way which frankly doesn't make sense to me and explains why I'm not seeing it in the save files that aren't crashing.

mov byte ptr [rax],al ds:00000000`00000000=??

[sarcastic_godot]

FYI: Starting an NG+ also makes the saves shrink back to 5MB. Alll the world history will then be flushed...

[decimus28]

That would be good, I'm hoping I can identify the trigger of the crash enough to finish the first run.

[Grubbs008]

Well, it did the same thing in Skyrim and Fallout, the longer you played the more bloat your save would get, the more likely it was to lag and crash.

[kdodds]

This seems like something you should absolutely be sharing with BGS on their Discord. They will not see it here.

[decimus28]

I have sent in the bug reports, the point to posting it here to for people to compare the scope of the issues and share there similar experiences.

[decimus28]

For example the saves in question that cause the fps drop and crashes are not dependent on the system. I have sent them to others to test and the same frame drop and crash results occur.

[nzguzzi]

You basically wiped your history.
I am at 400 hours same game, seems to run fine.
What are your rig stats?

[decimus28]

Sorry I misunderstood the wiping history for a sec, yeah not sure what has to line up right to cause the issues. I did scan 943 planets and do all there landing PoI but maybe it's a certain combo of skills or bugs building up. The main thing is that this crash and frame rate drop is dependent on the saves, not my system. It appears to be saves getting bloated and bugged. I can send you the save if you'd like to see the game crash and drop framerate too. I've already done so with others and usually takes about 2-8 minutes to trigger the CtD.

My system however is
7950x3d
4090
64 Gb DDR5
2 M2 in RAID 0 for games drive.

[ZombieHunter]

NG+ fixes a lot of issues. The more quests you do the more they seem to interact with one another. The only advice I can give is do one quest to completion before starting another. That way the chances of them interacting with one another might be less.

[decimus28]

I'm glad to hear NG+ fixes a lot. Do you know if that includes the no one in the ships when they land? I would bet it does but I have not gotten a chance to try. One at a time does seem like a safer way, I can at least know I can run a quest to completion or back up in saves easier that way.

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by decimus28:

I'm glad to hear NG+ fixes a lot. Do you know if that includes the no one in the ships when they land? I would bet it does but I have not gotten a chance to try.

I fixed this using console commands. I have heard that NG+ also fixes this. In my save I had a weird bug where it would spawn me in way above the ground or off center in my ship. I would be looking the wrong direction and when I 'got up from my seat' I would see the camera inside the ship but my character was outside on the right side of the ship out in space. Then I would fall through the ship and the collision detection would detect the floor and put me inside the ship. Very weird. It was like my X,Y,Z position was either not being saved or was being saved as NaN so then the code would put me at the origin of the local coordinate system. Very strange. If I saved on a planet, it would sometimes load me in 400 meters away from where I was.

NG+ fixed all of this. I know it sucks, but until they fix the interactions that cause these issues, it is the only thing you can do. There are console commands to use to reset quests and so on but you must be careful or you can disable achievements.

Bethesda is going to have a hard time finding out what causes some of these due to the complex interactions between quest scripts and game state.

[decimus28]

I have had weird z position for when I fast travel to certain civilian PoI on planets, it drops me 10 meters or so. And "Abandoned Hangers" will sometimes load me under the Stronghold ship when I land. Right now I'm trying to see if I can get to NG+ without any console commands. I know there is the "achievement enabler mod" but I'm big on achievements and don't ever like doing anything someone might question until after I get them.

Weird thing is that bit of code that causes the error is from this function
Starfield!agsSetDisplayMode+0x23855c
and if I run a debugger with a breakpoint set to it
Starfield!agsSetDisplayMode+0x23855c
it is only ever reached when I play my long saves that cause the CtD.

For some reason that AMD GPU service function is only getting called when loading those saves, at least that I have been able to catch in debugging.

Edit - Learned a lot since this post, like the actual function causing the issue is from the offset 0x23855c(in that release version) from agsSetDisplayMode. Didn't even know of the export functions symbols, function offsets, so on a week ago. Now I'm going through the code of the actual function.

[sonic16]

There are more of us in the similar situation. My thread :
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1716740/discussions/0/3955910099428042172/?tscn=1699886036

[Brandybuck]

I've had one crash in 300 hours. Gosh.

[decimus28]

Originally posted by Brandybuck:

I've had one crash in 300 hours. Gosh.

That is nice, I wish that was the case for us. But it's still an actual issue you can view by following though upto the line causing the crash in a debugger.