AMD 25.5.1 Patch Broke my Game (Solved!) - Discussion\Solutions

[GWSwift]

After hours of fine tuning at launch, I had the game running and looking great with FSR (quality setting, upscaled to 4k), Frame Gen, and high HW Lumen using patch 25.4.1. on my 6900XT and 5800X. I was like a proud dad, in awe of how well the pc I built 5 years ago still held up.

But then I started experiencing endless loading screens, hitching, and crashing immediately after updating to 25.5.1. The first load after the update went fine, until I left my Leyawiin house and hit the first loading screen. After an egregious amount of time, the game loaded and I proceeded to Best Goods (noticing that the framerate was hitching). One more long load later and after selling some things, the game crashed while exiting Best Goods. The audio would go in and out while attempting to load.

A few more attempts at loading the game had the same result. Research suggested that I downgrade back to 25.4.1 so I did - but the problem persisted. I completely uninstalled adrenaline and the drivers and reinstalled as well, to no avail.

I then learned that it may be a shader cache issue, so I used Adrenaline to clear the cache (From Gaming tab, click Oblivion, click Global Gaming Experience, scroll down and click Perform Reset, near Reset Shader Cache) in an effort to get Oblivion to rebuild the cache on the next load. Spoiler: It didn't work, and caused the game to crash at startup.

Note: You apparently cannot queue Oblivion to recompile the cache without some file manipulation - so I decided to save that option as a last resort, and instead used Adrenaline (above).

Next, the game started crashing shortly after launching it. All I actually saw was a Crash Report. Here is the Crash Report Info I was seeing (I fixed this by setting Oblivion.exe and the Win64_Shipping file to run as administrator):

OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
OblivionRemastered_Win64_Shipping
kernel32
ntdll

I am now able to access the game again; but haven't loaded a save yet to continue testing. I still think I'll need to get the game to recompile the shader cache. If you have experienced any of this, or have any advice or solutions, please reply. Thanks in advance!

Solved!
Solution:
Deleted the "Save_Settings.sav" file located in the Oblivion Remastered > Saved > SaveGames folder on the C: drive (copied the folder before editing). I then reloaded the game and it recompiled the cache. Problem solved!

[A TIN OF JAR]

Hmmm, I updated to 25.5.1 the day they released and play without issue, did you DDU in safe mode before installing 25.5.1?

[Kai]

It only looks like the crash exists in the executable meaning its hardcoded functions likely encountered a bug that was reoccurring until it snagged the UE5 so hard that UE5 has to close the game.

But due to the plugin being a gamebryo that loads esp/esm files, there is a good chance it errored out there which causes UE5 to not recieve any of the translated data, hence multiple lines of issue of the executable. Then it showed the os kernel reacting to a stopped process then ntdll which I dunno what it is other than possibly a OS dll.

[Kai]

I actually do suggest using config ini tweaks from mod sites and a Pak file mod, and then install dxvk to run the game in vulkan but translating data to dx12. It sometimes just bypasses the issue to let you experiment further.

The pak file mod can optimize how UE5 renders things using lumen and nanite by changing the settings used in those functions.

Remember that the latest GPU driver is more designed for the latest GPU. The 6900 XT doesn't have everything.

[Peaceful Joe]

Forgive me if this is ignorant, but if you had the game running perfectly before, why update? I'm not familiar with amd though. All I know is that I typically wait to update gpu drivers between games and not during the middle of them. If it ain't broke then don't fix it.

[PocketYoda]

i'm on 25.3.2 and everything runs solid on my rx6700xt. I see its wanting me to update but i wont be.

[Agentgerbil]

Nvidia master race.

[PocketYoda]

Originally posted by Agentgerbil:

Nvidia master race.

Yes stutter and crashing so master race lol

[Shinryue]

Do you try to do shader compilation in the game again by deleting folder with save (do a copy of your save before) ?
Go there : C:/User/name/document/mygames/oblivion remastered/save (delete folder) and restart the game.

[CHASE6]

Interesting. Before this update I was getting mad stuttering with 7900 xtx. This update totally cleaned that up.

[Kai]

I did update the game as well and noticed a few odd things. It ran the same as before, if not slightly better or is within a margin of error.

When I close the game it ends up causing a crash report on UE5 though, and the exception_access_violation is basically saying that the game did something bad in RAM, but the OS didn't react meaning it caught it and stopped it early.

Bethesda aren't good programmers to debug this, probably very easy for a skilled programmer today if they had the source code to look at... But generally it seems like Bethesda doesn't like to debug things related to RAM, in many of their past games with game crashing bugs and such, it is a common pattern you notice.

[Kai]

Also if you look at your save file, you notice it gets massive the longer you play.

From 161KB from exiting the sewers to my 3.5MB at level 25 and 21 hours in.

[grasmann]

I believe these crashes come from AMD FSR.
I'm a big fan of FSR but I think the implementation in oblivion remaster is not particularly robust.

I had seemingly random crashes after loading screens, when opening chests, or when opening menus or such.

I disabled FSR upscaling and frame generation and instead I'm using TSR and fluid motion frames in the AMD driver and that pretty much solved most of my crashes.
In fact it runs and looks better than ever.

It eventually starts lagging and stuttering if it runs for a while but I also made a lot of Engine.ini edits, so that could be the reason for it.
But to be honest that is my general experience: A bethesda game will crash eventually ... it's just the question how long it takes.

[Waingro]

Yes you're not alone in experiencing issues with 25.5.1. I also had a lot of long loading screens and bizarre high CPU usage that caused major stutters after updating the driver, as well as a graphical issue where it looked like there were blue strobing stars in all the trees. I've seen people mention this on reddit as well. I used DDU and did a fresh install to see if that helped but it didn't. I ended up rolling back to 25.4.1 and I did have the initial shader issues with long loading screens and weird CPU usage spikes, but after exiting and rebooting the game a couple times it is now running like how it used to. And the graphic issues are gone on 24.5.1 too.

The 25.5.1 driver is definitely unstable with this game and there are issues with the shader cache when changing drivers in general with this game.

[Moonwitch]

Yeah 25.5.1 has issues with Oblivion Remastered. Best to stick with 25.4.1 until another hotfix comes out.

[A TIN OF JAR]

Originally posted by Moonwitch:

Yeah 25.5.1 has issues with Oblivion Remastered.

Not for everybody it doesn't, I am on 25.5.1 and the remaster is running great.