Srceen freezes but game keeps running

Haquor · September 2018

Hi there,

Since wolfhunter i have been getting an issue where my screen image freezes but the game continues. I can hear myself using abilities and jumping etc. I can even hit enter and type away in chat. I know this due to discussing with people in discord and also by communicating the inevitsble crash to group members.

The game remains in this state until i alt-tab at which point after a brief black screen i get the 'eso has stopped working' error dialog.

So its like im forcing a crash to get out of the frozen screen state.

I have updated all drivers. Repaired the game files. Updated addons. Disabled addons and reduced graphics settings to near unworkable.

Is this type of crash being experienced by anyone else on PC and is there a workaround?
I know i havent provided tech specs im just curious if anyone else has had a similar issue since last uodate.

Cheers!

Metabox Prime P650HP
Windows 10 64bit
15.6" FHD 1920x1080 IPS WVA Matte 60Hz LED
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5 VRAM
Intel Core i7-7700HQ Quad Core (6M Cache up to 3.80 GHz)
8GB DDR4 2400MHZ Memory
Plextor S2G 512GB SATA 3 M.2 SSD

waistlessrwb17_ESO · September 2018

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

Haquor · September 2018

Awesome thanks ill try these suggestions. Played this evening for about 3 hours and it didnt happen once. Like you said tho other days ill have it every 30 minutes or more.

SheepdogPaladin · September 2018

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

qbit · September 2018

I've never experienced this. Running nVidia 1060 GTX and some crap AMD CPU with 6 slow cores. Windows 10 pro whatever with the latest update.

I do get a freeze when my weapon enchantment needs charged, but I suspect this is the game not pre-loading that weapon charge icon and having to send the texture over the PCIe bus and also compile the shader in that moment. And it freezes the whole game which is more noticeable since I'm in combat when it happens. But I'm just salty today and coming at the programmers. Sorry.

Haquor · September 2018

@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.

Euphoria666 · September 2018

Have the same issue with Intel i7-6950X CPU and GTX 1080Ti (both with OC but it happens without it as well).

One thing though to add when it happens sometimes my PC barely responds and i was forced to restart the PC to close the game.

Another thing i discovered though if i limit my FPS by 4-5 below my monitor's refresh rate which is 100 on Acer Predator X34, it almost stop this freeze-crash issue.
You can say its a weird workaround but thats the only thing that helped, and after doing it i rarely have this issue again but it still happens just not often.

Zorgon_The_Revenged · September 2018

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.

SheepdogPaladin · September 2018

It seems that enabling Vertical Sync in the game's video settings may have resolved this issue for me. I have not experienced the screen freeze for more than a week now.

As I originally mentioned, prior to returning to the game recently, I never experienced this issue before and I always had Vertical Sync disabled in the past for the three years I've played this game, including on other computers that I've owned.

It's possible that something else may have resolved this issue for me, but enabling vertical sync is all I know that seems to have worked for me.

Zorgon_The_Revenged · September 2018

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...….

Euphoria666 · September 2018

Yea it may have something to do with not syncing fps, but anyway since i manually set the fps cap to 94 i not had this issue again.

greylox · September 2018

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.

Haquor · September 2018

V-sync didnt make a difference for me. Ive adjusted evwry setting i can think of. N solution.

Zorgon_The_Revenged · October 2018

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).

Mudcrabber · October 2018

It started happening to me after last month's Windows Update pushed an nvidia driver update (mobile gtx 1060). After the crashes started I tried a manual update from the nvidia website but it made no difference.

Last night after two crashes within a half hour of each other, I switched from exclusive fullscreen mode to borderless window fullscreen. It felt a little jerky after the change but I made it two more hours without a crash before logging out for the night. It's too soon to tell if that helped.

Edit: I checked my event logs (win10) and found no errors/warnings in the system or application logs during the times of the crashes.

Edit 2: Lasted 4+ more hours without a crash after switching to borderless window fullscreen. I had also turned off vsync if that matters, adjusting MinFrameTime.2 for the same effect.

Edit 3: 2 more without a crash, or 8 hours altogether. I would have expected two or three by now.

Edit 4: Another day crash-free with those changes. 5: and another day

Masel · October 2018

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.

Haquor · October 2018

Im still having the same issue. No fix yet. New drivers, new settings, no addons, no fix.

Mudcrabber · October 2018

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.

Haquor · October 2018

Mudcrabber wrote: »

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.

Quick update to anyone with this issue. I followed Mudrabber's advice here and i havent had this freeze since i made these adjustments ocer two weeks ago. I consider this a fix.

Thanks a lot @Mudcrabber