Black screen after quitting

isoJs

Yesterday I started to get black screen with in game cursor when quitting the game, it won't go away. Alt+f4 don't work, task manager won't help, only thing that helped was control+alt+delete and shutting down pc from there. How to fix this?

Saelent

You can’t, that’s happened to me at least once with all Bethesda games.
Is your task manager set to always be on top? It sometimes doesn’t help only because you can’t see it.

isoJs

Saelent wrote: »

You can’t, that’s happened to me at least once with all Bethesda games.
Is your task manager set to always be on top? It sometimes doesn’t help only because you can’t see it.

Yeah I can't see task manager when this happens, so I need to set it to be on top. Thanks.

Sengra

This has happened a few times to me recently. It's usually when I ALT TAB for a couple of minutes. Never happened before that big patch I think.

gatekeeper13

Happens to me very often when I Alt-Tab. The ONLY game where it happens. In every other game I can alt-tab without issues.

This bug has been like foerever in the game but ZOS for some reason refuces/is unable to fix it.

Neoealth

Yeah can confirm I've also had this issue. Sometimes when I try to close the game or when I alt tab the game to view websites.

seaef

I have this issue on my Mac as well. It seems the longer I play, the longer it takes to shutdown.

If I play for 30-60 minutes, then I get the black screen and it take about 2-3 minutes to fully shut down. If I play for several hours, it never shuts down and I have to do a hard reboot.

MilkJugg24

From most of what I've read, it sounds like this is some form of memory leak. I thought this was a Windows-only issue until @seaef replied with his comment about playing on Mac OS. Have any of you guys ran a repair recently in the game launcher? Are you all playing on Fullscreen? Perhaps try playing on Windowed (Fullscreen), a.k.a., borderless if that option is supported. It should allow you to Alt+Tab and end the game through task manager or monitor the resources it's using.

Do any of you come particularly close to maxing out your system's memory (RAM)? I know Windows 10 has a RAM caching algorithm which suspends certain applications to prevent the system from running out of RAM. This could cause your system to use your storage device to store data temporarily, which upon closing the game, might take time to access, change, then delete. As time goes on, and that file becomes larger, so does the time for the game to properly close. If you are reaching 90% usage on RAM or higher consistently, I have a bet that this might be the issue.

Please let me know what you guys find.

seaef

MilkJugg24 wrote: »

From most of what I've read, it sounds like this is some form of memory leak. I thought this was a Windows-only issue until @seaef replied with his comment about playing on Mac OS. Have any of you guys ran a repair recently in the game launcher? Are you all playing on Fullscreen? Perhaps try playing on Windowed (Fullscreen), a.k.a., borderless if that option is supported. It should allow you to Alt+Tab and end the game through task manager or monitor the resources it's using.

Do any of you come particularly close to maxing out your system's memory (RAM)? I know Windows 10 has a RAM caching algorithm which suspends certain applications to prevent the system from running out of RAM. This could cause your system to use your storage device to store data temporarily, which upon closing the game, might take time to access, change, then delete. As time goes on, and that file becomes larger, so does the time for the game to properly close. If you are reaching 90% usage on RAM or higher consistently, I have a bet that this might be the issue.

Please let me know what you guys find.

I don't think it's a memory leak with the game. I played for 45 minutes this afternoon and the memory footprint went from 1.51G to 1.82G. That's not much. One thing I did notice it that the memory footprint of the launcher tripled!

I tabbed out of the game and shut down the launcher and played for another 15 minutes. When I quit the game, it closed after about 10 seconds, instead of 1-2 minutes if at all.

I'm going to try the same thing (shutting the launcher after starting the game) and play a lot longer. I'll let you know if it shuts down faster.

Unfortunately I can't start the game outside of the launcher because I get the spinning camera when I do, so closing the launcher after starting the game may be the temporary solution. We'll see.

MilkJugg24

seaef wrote: »

One thing I did notice it that the memory footprint of the launcher tripled!

Interesting. Thank you for providing this observation. I will make note of this and keep an eye on my Bethesda.net_launcher.exe tonight while I'm playing.

Perhaps Windows is caching the launcher while playing, and having issues returning information to it when the game closes. For example, the Play button will turn from blue to gray while the game is active. It stays in this state until it detects that the ESO64.exe is no longer running.

Or... you know what. Maybe there is a memory leak on the launcher. I'm sitting here right now, and my memory allocation is consistently going up by about 50-80Kb/s.

Yep, after launching the game, and sitting here for 2 minutes, the launcher was allocated about 21MB of my RAM additionally. Which after doing some quick math, would be about half a gigabyte per hour at that rate. With that said, most budget systems have about 8GB of RAM, so it's safe to say that this could be a cause for the issue.

@isoJs @Sengra @gatekeeper13 @Neoealth

Can you guys close the ESO Launcher once you start the game. Report back here what difference it makes, if any. It seems like we're onto something here.

Update: It appears that the launcher actually goes down in RAM usage every few minutes, mine went from 142MB to 137MB, but slowly increases further each time it cycles. So, perhaps this is not the issue. Still worth giving a test though.

seaef

Well, I'm sorry to report it didn't solve the issue. I played for two hours this morning with the launcher closed and had to reboot after I received the black screen hang after quitting.

I'm going to look through the logs today and see if I can find *anything* that might explain why it's doing this.

seaef

OK, looks like I've got it [partially] licked.

It does appear to be the launcher that's the problem. Starting the game from the launcher and then quitting the launcher won't solve the infinite hang, but starting the game outside of the launcher will. It still takes 30-45 seconds to shut down if you've been playing for several hours, but at least it does shut down.

I just launch the game executable directly. I can always run the launcher if I need to update the game.

MilkJugg24

seaef wrote: »

I just launch the game executable directly. I can always run the launcher if I need to update the game.

Thank you for the suggestion. I used to do this on my old laptop, not for this issue specifically, but for general efficiency reasons.

seaef

MilkJugg24 wrote: »

seaef wrote: »

I just launch the game executable directly. I can always run the launcher if I need to update the game.

Thank you for the suggestion. I used to do this on my old laptop, not for this issue specifically, but for general efficiency reasons.

I hope it works for you. Remember I'm on a Mac, not a PC, but since the problem seems to be universal, I would expect the solution to work for you as well.