Crashes

[EUMOK1]

Oblivion Remastered Crashes: A Deep Dive Into a Cross-Platform Engine-Level Bug

TL;DR:
This post summarizes a major crash issue in Oblivion Remastered that appears across all platforms (PC + Xbox), all GPU vendors, and multiple player scenarios. After debugging across hours of play, I believe the root cause lies in the way legacy Oblivion scripting and object calls interact with Unreal Engine 5’s asynchronous streaming and memory systems.


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Crash Pattern Observed:

Happens when transitioning from interior to exterior areas, or fast traveling

Can trigger during save/load, continue from menu, or exiting dialogue scenes

Affected systems include:

AMD & Nvidia GPUs

Intel CPUs

Xbox Series X/S consoles



> This crash is not isolated to one hardware or driver set. It is engine-level and manifests inconsistently, often after 1–3 hours of play.




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What the Logs Show:

The crash descends into:

OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping

kernel32.dll

ntdll.dll


On PC, this presents as a GPU crash dump followed by the Unreal Engine crash reporter.

On console, it causes an app crash to the dashboard.



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Likely Root Cause (Based on Technical Analysis):

The legacy Oblivion scripts are attempting to access or maintain references to objects (e.g., items, terrain meshes, or triggers) that have already been flushed or unloaded by UE5’s streaming system. This results in:

A GPU memory call attempting to render or resolve an asset that no longer exists

A mismatch between a shader/material and its referenced mesh or transform data

A crash when the system can’t resolve or recover that invalid state


This behavior is consistent with a streaming pool overflow, invalid render thread call, or dangling object reference passed to the GPU too early or too late.


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Why This Affects Everyone:

Consoles cannot modify .ini files or driver behavior—yet they crash too.

The PC version, even with tuning, still crashes under heavy zone transitions.

This indicates a systemic issue in the packaged build—not something the player can permanently fix.



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Temporary Mitigations (PC only):

For PC users, I’ve had limited success reducing crash frequency by:

Disabling AMD Adrenalin overrides

Disabling Steam Overlay

Launch flags:

-useallavailablecores -NoTextureStreaming -windowed

Modifying Engine.ini:

[SystemSettings]
r.Streaming.PoolSize=6144
r.Streaming.LimitPoolSizeToVRAM=1
r.Lumen.Reflections=0
r.Lumen.GlobalIllumination=0


> However, this does not eliminate the problem, and console users have no such options.




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Request to Devs:

This crash behavior cannot be resolved by the community alone. It is likely caused by a mismatch between legacy asset logic (or wrapper calls) and UE5's async loading pipeline. I believe it warrants:

A formal investigation and memory validation patch

A review of how objects are held or released between world transitions

A user-configurable memory/streaming setting or fallback toggle in the options menu



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If You've Experienced This Too:

Please comment with:

System specs or console model

What you were doing when the crash occurred

Whether you’re using mods or launch flags


Let’s help gather more data and push for visibility.


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This game is beautiful, and I want to keep playing it. But we shouldn’t be the QA department for a shipping product.
The bug is real. It’s replicable. And it needs a fix.

— A concerned and capable player (aka @Eumok)

[Orim]

You also didn't mention poor memory management overall (not just in dumping), and system overheating (due to the game being such a ridiculous memory hog)- IF yer system becomes sufficiently overheated, yer GONNA have what appear to be 'random' crashes, even IF the final crash message 'appears' to be the same, over multiple platforms. I'm willing to guess that those with far fewer to ZERO crashes to date have supercooled (or at least sufficiently cooled) systems...

I'd suggest listing in this thread (or perhaps in a separate thread addressed as 'personal memory management' ANY and ALL selectable settings that can be checked off to reduce (OVER time, not simply in the initial 5 minutes of play) overall memory usage...

[Orim]

Yep- crashed again by going into the same area from a saved game....lets see what happens...

[EUMOK1]

Originally posted by Orim:

You also didn't mention poor memory management overall (not just in dumping), and system overheating (due to the game being such a ridiculous memory hog)- IF yer system becomes sufficiently overheated, yer GONNA have what appear to be 'random' crashes, even IF the final crash message 'appears' to be the same, over multiple platforms. I'm willing to guess that those with far fewer to ZERO crashes to date have supercooled (or at least sufficiently cooled) systems...

I'd suggest listing in this thread (or perhaps in a separate thread addressed as 'personal memory management' ANY and ALL selectable settings that can be checked off to reduce (OVER time, not simply in the initial 5 minutes of play) overall memory usage...

While I agree with logging this data, heat shouldn't be an identifier here. Heat, across this many types of hardware, ranges of tiers, and modern mitigation should point that heat is a symptom of what ever is happening in the engine.

Look across all the threads. All the missing assets, missing triggers, decoupling shaders or objects, graphical artifacts re-rendering and so on, point to a memory handler or missing handler or a improperly utilized handler.

I'm just an average guy. I'm not a developer nor system engineer. I just play one on TV. :)

[Blue Monkey]

Disabling HARDWARE LUMEN fixed it for me!

[EUMOK1]

Originally posted by ★REM★:

almost 50 hours. ZERO crashes. take your math. It's your system.

Hey REM,

Respectfully, this isn't a "your system" issue. If it were hardware-related, we wouldn’t be seeing reproducible crashes across wildly different setups—NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, consoles, low-end rigs, high-end rigs alike. These aren’t isolated cases. They follow a clear pattern: entering or exiting environments, opening certain menus, or transitioning assets in and out of memory.

What’s happening here isn’t just “bad optimization.” The game appears to be invoking kernel-level calls from user space, likely through Unreal Engine 5’s memory or shader handler. That should never happen in a stable environment. A modern OS will crash hard only when a protected memory space is violated—either through a driver fault, invalid pointer dereference, or malformed GPU call.

You don’t get that from old drivers or high temps. You get that when the software mismanages its own runtime environment and crosses a boundary it shouldn't.

A driver acting improperly on behalf of the software,


2. Unreal Engine 5 executing an unsafe memory call,


3. Misuse of low-level APIs (like DX12, Vulkan, or OpenCL) that bypass safety layers,


4. Or a corrupted execution path, where a null, invalid, or misaligned pointer ends up in a place it shouldn’t even be able to reach.



You’ve probably seen crashes before due to unhandled exceptions, asset loading fails, physics bugs, etc.—but those stay in user space. A kernel-level crash triggered reliably and repeatedly by gameplay actions (exiting buildings, loading areas, etc.) means the engine is mismanaging protected memory, or sending malformed instructions into the driver stack. That should never happen outside of deliberately low-level programming or firmware development.

In short: this isn’t a “bad port” or “under-tested game.” This is a critical engine-layer failure likely stemming from UE5's memory paging system, or how it's interfacing with Windows graphics stack and I/O management.

Nobody’s system is “too weak” or “too unique” here. The issue is in the engine’s interaction with system memory, and probably a missing or broken fail-safe in the runtime handler.

[Travis]

Same Problem

[EUMOK1]

Thanks to everyone contributing, but I want to be very clear:

This isn't about hardware differences, overclocking, or even Lumen alone. This is a shared memory boundary issue—the engine is triggering a kernel call failure across multiple architectures.

That means it’s either failing to assign a proper handler or object before it makes the call, or it's passing a malformed pointer to the OS. That’s a software-side runtime error, not a user misconfiguration.

Workarounds like disabling Lumen or lowering settings might delay the issue, but as the game progresses and memory load increases (larger zones, more scripts, AI events, etc.), I suspect these will fail too.

We're not looking at a performance bottleneck—we're looking at an invalid memory operation that slips past UE5’s safeguards and hits the OS kernel layer.

The fact that this appears across AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and even PS5 confirms it. The system doesn't matter. The engine call does.

I’m just trying to get this addressed before players hit game-breaking crashes down the line.

[Frog]

CPU: Intel i7 14700k
GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 5080
RAM: 32 G
Turned off overlays, turned off frame gen, turned off ray tracing lowered graphics, but
crashing to black screens consistently around 45 min- 1 hour of gameplay.

[Wille84FIN]

Still sounds a lot like you haven't optimized your Windows for gaming. To what that entails, someone else with more patience / free time can explain that for you.

All i hear is "i have cloud based security, virtualization based security, core isolation, memory integrity, driver signing etc. enabled and i'm gaming on the system. That was just the short of it.

My system:

Windows 11 Pro (optimized for gaming), all games installed on custom locations with full permissions and exceptions added to necessary software, 12900K (OC, core parking disabled), no undervolting, balanced overclocking, sufficient cooling, OCCT full AVX blast stable, 4080 Super (stock, water cooled) driver 576.28, AW8321DW, 64Gb DDR5 (XMP II), Z690, 2x4Tb 990 Pro NVME, Scarlett 16i16 audio, 1KW PSU.

Not a single crash. Well, with some mods i had a few but that was on me.

[-=Martin=-]

This game is so typically Bethesda. Crashing a lot, buggy as hell (items dissapearing from secure containers, crafted items loosing their enhancements, etc. etc.) - Sad.
Just today at some point anfter playing for a while I noticed the game starting to stutter slighty suddenly. Made a quicksave and tried to move for one more minute or so to see if the stutters go away again, but no. So I quit game, restart PC and game. Now when I load this quicksave my game instantly crashes. Last save is 1 hour ago and I can for sure not remember what exactly I did. Thank you for the fun.

[Azteca]

usually after 20 minutes start to crash when I pass a door or change to a new area
It's the only game so far that I have this issue
hope we get a patch soon

rocessor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14700KF (28 CPUs), ~3.4GHz
Memory: 65536MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 65350MB RAM
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip type: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
Device Type: Full Device (POST)
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_2684&SUBSYS_51041462&REV_A1
Device Status: 0180200A [DN_DRIVER_LOADED|DN_STARTED|DN_DISABLEABLE|DN_NT_ENUMERATOR|DN_NT_DRIVER]
Device Problem Code: No Problem
Driver Problem Code: Unknown
Display Memory: 56816 MB
Dedicated Memory: 24142 MB
Shared Memory: 32674 MB
Current Mode: 3440 x 1440 (32 bit) (60Hz)
HDR Support: Not Supported
Display Topology: Internal
Display Color Space: DXGI_COLOR_SPACE_RGB_FULL_G22_NONE_P709
Color Primaries: Red(0.639648,0.330078), Green(0.299805,0.599609), Blue(0.150391,0.059570), White Point(0.312500,0.329102)
Display Luminance: Min Luminance = 0.500000, Max Luminance = 270.000000, MaxFullFrameLuminance = 270.000000
Monitor Name: Generic PnP Monitor
Monitor Model: Dell AW3418DW
Monitor Id: DELA0FA
Native Mode: 3440 x 1440(p) (59.973Hz)
Output Type: Displayport External
Monitor Capabilities: HDR Not Supported
Display Pixel Format: DISPLAYCONFIG_PIXELFORMAT_32BPP
Advanced Color: Not Supported
Using DDisplay: Yes
WCG: Wcg Not Supported
Active Color Mode: DISPLAYCONFIG_ADVANCED_COLOR_MODE_SDR
Driver Name: C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvmdi.inf_amd64_845fc316023c1865\nvldumdx.dll,C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvmdi.inf_amd64_845fc316023c1865\nvldumdx.dll,C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvmdi.inf_amd64_845fc316023c1865\nvldumdx.dll,C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvmdi.inf_amd64_845fc316023c1865\nvldumdx.dll
Driver File Version: 32.00.0015.7628 (English)
Driver Version: 32.0.15.7628
DDI Version: 12
Adapter Attributes: HARDWARE_TYPE_GPU,D3D11_GRAPHICS,D3D12_GRAPHICS,D3D12_CORE_COMPUTE,D3D12_GENERIC_ML,D3D12_GENERIC_MEDIA
Feature Levels: 12_2,12_1,12_0,11_1,11_0,10_1,10_0,9_3,9_2,9_1,1_0_CORE
Driver Model: WDDM 3.2

[Torsion]

Originally posted by Wille84FIN:

Still sounds a lot like you haven't optimized your Windows for gaming. To what that entails, someone else with more patience / free time can explain that for you.

All i hear is "i have cloud based security, virtualization based security, core isolation, memory integrity, driver signing etc. enabled and i'm gaming on the system. That was just the short of it.

My system:

Windows 11 Pro (optimized for gaming), all games installed on custom locations with full permissions and exceptions added to necessary software, 12900K (OC, core parking disabled), no undervolting, balanced overclocking, sufficient cooling, OCCT full AVX blast stable, 4080 Super (stock, water cooled) driver 576.28, AW8321DW, 64Gb DDR5 (XMP II), Z690, 2x4Tb 990 Pro NVME, Scarlett 16i16 audio, 1KW PSU.

Not a single crash. Well, with some mods i had a few but that was on me.

Absolutely useless reply. No one in this thread has mentioned any of the things you mentioned. OP has, in great detail, investigated the root cause of the issue and explained it very well. OP knows what's up, you have no clue. This game needs patches, the fact that a group of people has no issues doesn't meant the game in itself has no issues. The game crashes, a lot, for no reason. I'm playing games all day, no problem, but this game crashes 50% of the time I load into a new area, and you say "my windows isn't optimized for gaming"? Wth does that even mean

[Syko_totem]

So far I have been crash free, until I tried to Serve time in jail. Then the crash is there every time.

[Wille84FIN]

Originally posted by Torsion:

Originally posted by Wille84FIN:

Still sounds a lot like you haven't optimized your Windows for gaming. To what that entails, someone else with more patience / free time can explain that for you.

All i hear is "i have cloud based security, virtualization based security, core isolation, memory integrity, driver signing etc. enabled and i'm gaming on the system. That was just the short of it.

My system:

Windows 11 Pro (optimized for gaming), all games installed on custom locations with full permissions and exceptions added to necessary software, 12900K (OC, core parking disabled), no undervolting, balanced overclocking, sufficient cooling, OCCT full AVX blast stable, 4080 Super (stock, water cooled) driver 576.28, AW8321DW, 64Gb DDR5 (XMP II), Z690, 2x4Tb 990 Pro NVME, Scarlett 16i16 audio, 1KW PSU.

Not a single crash. Well, with some mods i had a few but that was on me.

Absolutely useless reply. No one in this thread has mentioned any of the things you mentioned. OP has, in great detail, investigated the root cause of the issue and explained it very well. OP knows what's up, you have no clue. This game needs patches, the fact that a group of people has no issues doesn't meant the game in itself has no issues. The game crashes, a lot, for no reason. I'm playing games all day, no problem, but this game crashes 50% of the time I load into a new area, and you say "my windows isn't optimized for gaming"? Wth does that even mean

Don't have to know what the OP thinks, it's all previous experience. The symptoms say more than the OP's post does. But you big brained intellectual seem to have it all figured out already, so i'm just going to let you keep on keeping right. Lol.

[boognish]

this thread makes me feel so heard

Ryzen 7
3070ti
32GB RAM

whenever i quicksave in the jeral mts. also triggers in other situations. always the Windows_Shipping error OP alluded to, and option to send UE5 error report

also like others, played 15-20 hours with no issues. i updated my nvidia drivers (have sense rolled back, uninstall, reinstall clean, etci). hunch is that the save file itself is corrupted so i either need to reload a really old save or start a new toon.