Game Temporarily Freezes Loading Character Voices : V

» Thu Jul 11, 2013 6:44 pm

Hi all,

I've had this problem since day 1 with Skyrim and cannot find the answer. I have a reasonably high end system with a completely vanilla install of Skyrim with all the updates from steam. During gameplay there is a noticeable freeze for a second or so when any speech is loading in the game. This happens when I simply walk past NPCs in towns, when choosing menu items in dialogue and worst of all during fights when the game is loading taunts etc. Makes the game pretty unplayable and certainly ruins the atmosphere.

Here's my specs:

Intel Core i7-2630QM (Quad Core)

RAM : 8Gb

Nvidia GeForce GTX 640M

Realtek Hi-Def Audio

I'm running the game with Nvidia optimised settings (very high default with a few tweaks) but with the Nvidia panel closed during play, anti virus disabled, nothing else running and all drivers updated to latest versions.

So far I've tried:

Extracting all voice files from 'Skyrim - Voices.bsa' and replacing this file with the extracted contents so it's not doing it on the fly.

I've tried adding the following lines to SkyrimPrefs.ini (tested both with .bsa file and extracted voice files)

[BackgroundLoad]

bUseBackgroundFileLoader=1

bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1

bBackgroundCellLoads=1

bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1

bBackgroundLoadLipFiles=1

No effect.

At the moment I'm playing with all voice files completely removed from the data directory and using subtitles. The game plays like a dream like this but lacks atmosphere, plus the subtitles often don't stay on screen long enough to read them, presumably they are linked to timing data in the .fuz voice files.

Worst case scenario, I'd like a way of forcing the subs to remain on screen long enough to read, but of course, I'd much prefer to fix the issue.

Any help greatly appreciated.