I've been having this issue for the longest time, though unfortunately it has turned out to be driver related which I've yet to find to a fix for. It comes down to the display driver crashing and resetting for some unknown reason. For ESO it happens as you've described, in other games the effect will be different. For example in unreal engine games, I will instead get a crash that states "Error: Unreal Engine is exiting due to D3D device being lost"

In Windows 10, display driver resets happen invisibly so it can be hard to know that this is happening unless you look into the event viewer.

To confirm that this is the issue, go to the Event Viewer -> Windows Logs -> System and look for any errors from source: nvlddmkm or warnings from source: display that should say "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." (When I initially had this problem I never saw any of these errors, so try other games and see if you can get these errors to show up if you dont see them)

Now I've tried dozens of things to fix this. Reinstalling windows, DDU and reinstalling drivers, downclocking you name it I've tried it. The issue occurs seemingly at random, it might not happen for a few days, then happen lots of times in the span of an afternoon, there might be some key thing I'm doing but its difficult to pin down.

A number of things I would suggest trying to reduce how often this occurs:

Don't run any web browser in the background, disable any and all in-game overlays (i.e steam, discord), make sure ESO is the only main app running (if you need discord and/or steam open, keep them open in background but have the window for them closed).

Also try other things on google that people have suggested for driver crashes, such as disabling the HDMI audio device for your GPU. (should be under "Sound, video and games controllers" in device manager.)

Let me know if anything I suggested works, or if you figure out something else that manages to work. This particular problem is a very nasty one to figure out, good luck!

edit: My system specs:
Nvidia GTX 960 4GB
16GB RAM
R5 1600x @ 4ghz CPU
ASUS B350M
Game installed on SSD

Yes! I have this issue too!

Once in a while, the entire screen would just randomly freeze completely. I could be doing anything in the game at the time the screen freezes. While the screen is frozen, it seems I can do anything in the game, but I can't see what I'm actually doing because only the screen is frozen. I can hear the entire environment around my character. I can hear all the interface sounds too. I can move anywhere and hear my character's footsteps. I can mount and dismount and hear the mount sounds. If I activate auto-run and then the screen suddenly freezes, I have to manually stop my character from moving to prevent my character falling off a cliff or entering a dangerous area since I can't see where I'm going in real time when the screen freezes. I can hear dolmens and players actively doing the dolmens.

I can open and close the various character and game menus. I can even use chat and I tried typing out blindly /reloadui whenever the screen freeze occurs, but nothing I do restores the screen, so I must perform Alt+F4 to completely exit the game to resolve the issue.

For me, this does not happen to me too frequently but it certainly is not rare. I would say it happens once or twice per game session. I recently returned to the game after several months hiatus and this issue started happening to me for the very first time when I returned to the game a week ago. I never had this issue in the past.

So far, my character has never died directly from this screen issue as it has never happened yet while my character is actively in combat, but the issue appears to be very random and it probably could happen during combat as there is no specific action that seems to trigger this issue.

I have reinstalled the game and also my graphics driver, but to no avail. This issue continues.

Acer Nitro 5 AN515-51 series gaming laptop
Intel i5-7300HQ
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 4GB GDDR5
12GB RAM DDR4-2666
256GB SSD
Windows 10 64-bit

@SheepDogPaladin this sounds like exactly my issue. I still havent found a fix and its very frustrating.

@qbit its not the same issue cause mine can happen in and out of combat and i will charge weapons without it happening.

Just happened to me (happened a few times since, I think, Summerset performance updates), all I was doing was some crafting writs in an empty Deshaan. (on a full uninstall/reinstall vanilla install of the game)

Oh well, ctrl-shift-esc for a force quit and load a game that works.

I've always had v-sync enabled but I'll check next time I log in.....which won't be tonight as less than half an hour of crafting writs in a fairly quiet city and I get the same bug.

I'd like to thank the devs for acknowledging this bug/technical problem and all the effort they put into making their game run well, helping it to be the best damn MMO out there...….

Same, been happening for years so different drivers dont seem to make a difference. Gonna turn V-sync back on.

Strange how this is the only game it ever happens to me on.

Logged in for the first time since my last post in this thread, did some craft writs, did a master writ, went to the bank to deposit some mats and boom....same bug.

I got a great sense of accomplishment finding out (even with this freeze frame bug) I can now press ESC, find where it would say "Quit Game" on the left of the screen with my mouse pointer, press "E" and log out (I was hoping to hit "Log Out" to see if it could fix things, next time maybe).

This keeps happening to me too. And I know many others that have the same problem. I submitted these reports a lot, but nothing happened so far. Also tried the regular advice they have in their troubleshooting, didn't help.

I still haven't had another crash since my setting changes, with my mobile gtx 1060, though I don't know which change is responsible.

These are my exact UserSettings.txt changes:

PreferExclusiveFullscreen from 1 to 0
FULLSCREEN_v5 from 2 to 1
VSYNC from 1 to 0
MinFrameTime.2 from "0.01000000" to "0.01660000"

The last setting is to cap it to my refresh rate of 60 fps without vsync.