I don't know if anybody could help me, but i always try to have big battles in Skyrim like 200+ npc's fighting each other. Sadly Skyrim's engine doesn't, well let's say it doesn't perform very well and doesn't use all the power my pc can give it. Because of this the game always freezes or ctd's when i try to have a battle. I know it are not my specs that are the problem because it is always up to skyrim if it crashes or not. 1 out of ten times it runs fine with 200 npc's but the other 9 times it just freezes in my face with nothing that i can do about it. I only have like 6 mods installed and my paparys logs are only 16kb so that's not the problem. My specs are as folllowed:

Intel i7 2600 @3.4Ghz with cooler master Gemini m4 (Maybe i need a better cpu or one i can overclock)

Asus Gtx 590 ( this should be fine since i also oc'd to 700MHz and 1689Mhz)

8GB of Ram ( maybe make this 16 gb?)

920 watt psu (should also be fine)

As per mods i have every DLC and every unofficial patch for it excluding Heartfire. here are the other ones might you need to see them.

Cloaks.esp

run for your lives.esp

Realistic Lightning Overhaul ( and all included files)

Alternate start - Live another live

Character preset ( made ths my own so i could keep my character if i had to delete all saves because Skyirim has a bad day)

GR123 Knights Templar

ISD_LongclawCraft

Army.esp (also self made, adds factions to dremora and other creatures to they work together so i have an army to fight against, hence the name)

winterhold expand.esp

As far as i know these mods should not be any issues but as always for my Skyrim it is. If the next ES has just as much issues as Skyrim i'm never buying an ES game again because even when i don't have battles goinh on the game still freezes and ctd's in my face whenever it pleases. I also added like every .ini performance tweak i could find so Skyrim utilizes my multiple cores better but since this game isn′t optimized for that it didn't really help.

Anyone?

the game can't handle 200+ NPCs, that is why when attacking Forts or a City in the Civil War, it only spawns maybe 10 at a time, and when they are killed it spawns more

Oh, there are probably no mods or tweaks or something to make the game run smoother when running under that kind of stress? Something like an AI simplifier or something so the game doesn't have to do as much work?

Not much activity on the forums i see...

I try hard....lol

Very helpful.

lol

Maybe you think your computer is a beast, but with 200 npc's on a terrain...

Believe me if you overclock your CPU and GPU on a already sloppy programed game you will gain nothing beside problems.

(And why in the world you overclock a 3GB DDR5 graphic card !!!! You have already over 300 (GB/sec) Memory Bandwidth )

Before you go and change all your pc configuration, why you don't try to lower your resolution. (i presume you play at 1920x1080, right... )

And try it with this mod disabled "Realistic Lightning Overhaul" even at 1920x1080 !!!!!

(You might simply be using too much system resources. !!! )

And yep i don't think your modes have any to do with your crashes....but maybe your save is already "dirty" by previously uninstalled mods. !!!!

Well... I wouldn't think the pc couldn't handle it if i've had battles with 200+ npc's that ran at 50 fps or so and the reason i oc'd the videocard was... Well because i could. I figured if i kept it at stock voltage nothing would go wrong if i didn't pumped it too much up and so far the game runs a bit better then before. This save is already a clean save by the way. I haven't uninstalled any mods since i started it. I also already tried how the game would react with the lowest graphics but it's not that the pc isn't able to handle it graphic wise. It are the multiple things going on at once because the game freezed just like before. That was the whole reason i was thinking of overclocking since Skyrim seems to profit more from a faster clockspeed because it doesn't handle multi threading very well, and all these multiple things that have to get initialized by the game engine is something that's handled by the cpu correct me if i'm wrong.

That would be 100% correct if SKYRIM's game engine was proper programmed. !!!

That's from Techpowerup overclocking test with this card:

On NVIDIA I couldn't find a fix for the extremely unstable card during overclocking. When increasing clocks to find stable settings, the card often completely crashes the system in a test that it completed before,

with Windows 7 the normal behaviour should be that the driver will stop rendering, show a "The driver has stopped responding" message, and you can't just continue without reboot.

Within a short time of testing, the card broke permanently by what seems to be an overcurrent situation.

NVIDIA promises that their power capping will avoid such conditions by constantly monitoring the card's power draw and reducing clocks if necessary.

Apparently that system did not work and took the card with it. If that happens to you, my suggestion is that you should really not engage in overclocking with GeForce GTX 590 until this issue has been completely cleared up.

For the record, the card worked perfectly fine and rock stable when it was just installed and left alone without any extra tweaking.

Strange. I thought NVIDIA already put a power cap on the gtx 590 with some driver update? I read something about people not being able to overclock the card to higher voltages because the card would then die because of heat and smoke would come off. I will try reverting back to stock settings and see if there is any decrease in the freezing. I hope so.

They put a power cap for voltage overclocking..yep.

Nevertheless you can overclock it but keep in mind a success overclocking depends on the graphics card bios and on the current drivers....

You can try this if you want. Those are stable overclocking rates from http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/04/03/asus_geforce_gtx_590_overclocking_followup/3#.Uc3fJ8qvySJ

Set CPU at 723 MHz, Memory at 1851MHz and Voltace at 0.963 Volt.**** (Your PSU can handle it with easy....your system configuration will get max. 680-700 Watt at load.)

---------------------------------------------

**** ...very important change, otherwise your Nvidia will crash.

Ah, that's the site i got my overclock settings from so that should be alright. I used the values from the "overclock no modification tab" and it's been running great on other games like Borderlands 2 and Mass effect 3. Although they already ran great even without the oc. Could there also be a problem with Skyrim never using more then 2Gb of RAM? It always keeps hanging around 2 or so and i've heard of the crashes at 3.2GB because skyrim is a 32-bit OS but i've never even reached those amounts. Which is strange since i run some graphics mods like the 2k texture pack and one time i've also tried the Sharpshooter enb but still the RAM wouldn't get higher then 2.

It's a 32-bit .exe, true, mostly because it's more or less a port from the consoles with minimal re-programming done to make it work on your PC.

This game uses more than 2gb of ram though. !!!

That's from a user configuration...

TESV.exe never will use more than 2Gb RAM, cause it 32bit process. Don't panic - it is normal

But what we can see on example of my PC: Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64, 8Gb RAM and 1Gb VideoCard.

So, after booting and logoning, with mininmal programs in memory loaded, I have total RAM consuming about 1.2Gb + 1.2Gb in paging swap file (pagefile.sys).

After launching and playing Skyrim about 2 hours I minimized game to tray and again started Process Explorer (ProceXP.exe) to see changes in consuming RAM. So they are: consumed totally 4.9Gb RAM and paging system consumed also ~4Gb. TESV.exe still showed that it eat no more than 1.8Gb !

Little calculations aboout RAM when running Skyrim: 4.9Gb (total consuming) - 1.2Gb (memory consuming after OS started) = 3.7Gb exactly this amount of RAM summary consumed my Skyrim with 100+ mods.

There are many other reasons that it is a 32-bit executable.

It will use up to 4 GB of RAM, it's LAA enabled as of 1.3.10. You need a 64-bit OS to take advantage of that, though.

yep...

Your information is wrong, that's what I'm pointing out. Skyrim will use more than 2 GB of RAM if the user has enough RAM and a 64-bit OS.

The absolute cap on the amount of NPCs Skyrim can handle period is 300 - 350.

But really, with all that's going on, it seems a little crazy. 50 vs 50 battles should suffice for what you're trying to do. Once you start going past 250 NPCs, water and shadows may start to get very jittery, and you'll have to restart the game to get rid of it.

The type of NPC also matters. For example, I can spawn 300 Dremora without it crashing. But If I spawn 200 mages, or 300 Draugr Overlords, it crashes. Warriors use up less memory than mages who switch rapidly between spells, and Draugr who all attempt to shout at once. So keep this in mind as well.

As for Dragons. you may be able to handle 50+, but do not spawn all of them at once. You'll have to do 5 at a time.

This game uses more than 2gb of ram though. !!!

I say the same think, more than 2GB.

Why are you upset !!!!