Skyrim freezes one second (as if loading)

[Muu]

Need help, Skyrim used to run really good before.. and while FPS wise (60fps) it still does, I seem to have loading freezes. It's during gameplay when walking around, I will hear my HD disk go crazy for a sec - game freezes for a second or so and then lets me continue playing. I was having this issue without mods enabled. By lowering graphics settings it seems somewhat better but it still freezes (just a bit less, I think). But since my FPS is high I don't see any need to lower the graphics.

It's obviously everytime when it needs to load something, so my question is how to fix this? I should probably look at disk defragmenter .. but incase that doesn't help, does anyone have other ideas for me? Granted, my Windows is sometimes running a bit slow (starting up, loading programs) and my HD drive is loading things all the time, yes I know.. background programs.. but I have none running other then Steam & AVG Antivirus (could this be an issue?). But other then that my PC has pretty decent specs, I might consider reinstalling Windows but that's such a hassle that I rather not to.

Is there anything aside from Disk Defragmenter in Windows to improve my gameplay/HD usage/loading in Skyrim? Load times itself I don't care, but while playing and having 1sec freezes every few minutes sucks.

[MrTimmyyTV]

You have savegame bloating. I fell victim to this myself. It is the result of poorly finished mods leaving scripts, thus bloating your savegame and causing the pause. I didn't manage to fix it, despite numerous attempts and just started again, with zero mods.

[GEX]

кто знает ка начать квест драгонборн?

[Muu]

Nade původně napsal:

You have savegame bloating. I fell victim to this myself. It is the result of poorly finished mods leaving scripts, thus bloating your savegame and causing the pause. I didn't manage to fix it, despite numerous attempts and just started again, with zero mods.

So I ought to start a new game with current mods or remove all mods? I really don't want to lose my mods, because I got the perfect set of graphics mods to make the game look amazing + my set of immersive mods. Any other solution?

[MrTimmyyTV]

feel free to google around, and let me know if you have success. But if you play with mods, this will eventually happen again AFAIK. yeah it sucks.

[Muu]

Yea I googled around and I found out that some mods have this issue when they don't properly end their scripts. One of mention that I found was something like "Enhanced Blood" (textures?/splatters? I forgot the exact name). Sadly I do not use this mod so it must be something else, I removed my saves (it wasn't a problem since I was still early in-game) and starting all over now. I've got a ton of mods so it's gonna be a while to figure out which one is doing this "leaking".

[Nameless]

Ick savegame bloating, lost my favorite saves to it ;-;. I don't really think it's possible to fix unless you start a new game. You have to be pretty careful uninstalling heavly scripted mods or else it happens (usually why I tend to avoid those types of mods).

[Kabacus]

Before you trash your game, how big is your save? Acceptable sizes are (very roughly) 3.5MB for a level 1 char, inreasing by about 2MB for every 10 character levels (so level 70 woudl be about 17MB)

I have experienced this type of issue when there are a lot of files in the save folder, moving all but the last 10 saves out of the folder sorted it for me.

[Muu]

Yea I was thinking it probably wasn't a savegame problem since my saves were only 5mb (granted, I was only a few levels). But after removing it and starting again the problem persists, I read somewhere it might be a shadow issue so I set it to low (while keeping the rest at ultra) and I will test it in a bit.

It just keeps freezing for a second (or two) when walking around, or looking at some areas (that it's seemingly still loading). Maybe I should consider disk defrag right now aswell.

[Kabacus]

Do you have many graphic enhancement or texture replacement mods? and if you do how much VRAM does your graphics card have?

[Muu]

1gb (I have the AMD Radeon HD6850), and yea I do run some graphic enhancements .. though I don't believe this would cause such problems (specially since the game is running smooth otherwise).

[Kabacus]

If you draw a blank with your shadow settings you may want to consider running Optimizer Textures[skyrim.nexusmods.com]. There is a video showing before and after. It is a little complicated so read up on it's use if you intend to try it, and don't try it if you are unsure about it.

Good luck, I hope you nail it.

[MrTimmyyTV]

check your HHD space as well, a pause can be caused by lack of room for skyrims to move around in (virtual memory space). You can uncheck all mods in the 'data files' part of skyrims options (or use NMM if you are modding that way) and test, add a few at a time to eliminate them and find out which one is causing your issue.

[Muu]

Thanks Kabacus! I got that optimizer and ran the full thing (textures & bsa) and after 5 minutes ingame the freezes seem drastically reduced (not gone, but alot less). So this definitely helped, I should probably run a disk defrag aswell.

About my HD space, on my C:\ (which I only really use for Windows & programs) I only got 2,3gb left, could that hurt? My Steam is installed on another partition though, D:\ .. which has all my games and has about 50gb free. Perhaps I could clean my C drive a bit.

[Kabacus]

Nice one, heading in the right direction.

There is the option of creating an additional paging file on D: if you can not recover any space from C: (you are a bit low). But before doing that, piriform.com have a freebie called CCleaner. That has a good tool for interactively finding and deleting temporary files across your PC, that might be worth a try first.

[Muu]

Kabacus původně napsal:

Nice one, heading in the right direction.

There is the option of creating an additional paging file on D: if you can not recover any space from C: (you are a bit low). But before doing that, piriform.com have a freebie called CCleaner. That has a good tool for interactively finding and deleting temporary files across your PC, that might be worth a try first.

I forgot about CCleaner, just did a run now of all temp files and registery (about 600mb removed and fixed a bunch of registery settings). Aside from that I noticed I had actually moved my paging file to D: instead of C:, it's the same HD just a different partition. But still, think I should get two (both on the C and D drive)?