RANDOM BLACK TEXTURES AND CRASHES? HERE'S HOW TO SOLVE IT ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Started having after some cell changes random black texture issues, after enhancing my mods more and more. It was easy to reproduce, by going in/out of the different shops in the imperial city. After passing some doors, black textures would randomly start to appear. After a bit more, a crash would occur.
After some experimenting and figuring out/understanding deeper, what some INI settings and tools/mods truely do, it turns out, that some suggestions are contra-productive.
The key to a very stable Oblivion setup, is to understand, how Oblivion is using the memory or rather, how or when it won't be able to use more than it can access. Reserving more memory for things, which may not need it, or for the purpose of supposedly hoping to improve performance, where it may not be needed these days, make less memory available for things where it's essential to be available or required.
Here's how to get this issue all stable. Really important: Always change ONLY ONE THING at a time, or you may never figure out what the most stable setup is.
More Heap is not always more stable (no pun intended lol) - less heap is better. Experiment with values between 512 and 1024, like 640, 768 and 832 (or add/subtract values like 64 and 32). 1024 is almost always too much! The reason for this is simple. With Oblivions memory limitations, less memory may be available for other things. My setup seems to do fine with 640, much less than I had before.
Another thing I realized is, it matters, how your cell buffers are used. The issue with the black textures, comes from the cell buffers. If Oblivion runs out of memory for the cell buffers or is out of cell buffers (having too much heap available, may not trigger old cells cleaned up when needed maybe?), textures simply won't be able to be loaded, similar as if they were missing on disc.
Some may have increased in the Oblivion.ini file, the values for the variables uExterior Cell Buffer and uInterior Cell Buffer. Well, what many seem to miss is the fact, that this suggestion initially came from people running Oblivion un-modded, where it may very well improve things. Simply, because the vanilla data require less memory, and so may cache more cells in RAM. However, a modded Oblivion, will require more resources for each cell, so raising the cell buffers, may hit several limits or make memory mechanisms not work as intended.
Here again, lower values for a modded or heavily modded Oblivion are better. I left exteriors to the default 36, and increased Interiors just up to 6. This seemed to be the perfect value, where 3 would work worse in other ways, and higher values would start causing these issues.
One other setting seemed also to help here a lot. After I tested with the console, purging cell buffers every time on cell changes, seemed also to not trigger the issue. Though, that is a BAD idea, as it eliminates anything cached in memory. However, setting bPreemptivelyUnloadCells to 1in combination with a good, not too high number of cell buffers, will trigger it not too often, yet often enough when needed. Even though in the past, this setting was often not suggested to change, ignore that suggestion, because it won't matter performance-wise with today's powerful hardware, but it will matter for stability! I do NOT suggest though mods which purge after every loading, because these eliminate unintelligently all buffers instantly and causes constant reloading between interiors/exteriors changes. Not something you want.
What else should you pay attention to?
Adjust also the variable iPreloadSizeLimit. I have set it to just 52428800 (and even though I've 32GB RAM) and works great. I tried with higher values, once again here too, set it too high, and issues will start appearing. WIth today's discs being so much faster than before 10-14 years, smaller preloading isn't an issue. The issue is rather with Oblivion, if it requests more memory to use, which may be not available anymore, because it can't use memory beyond the 4GB memory space (oh yes, you patched your version for 4GB, correct?).
You should get rid of OSR. Seriously, get rid of it. I kept it alongside MoreHeap, because of people saying, that it still helps. That's not true. Actually, after some research OSR causes now with Windows 10 and 11 more crashes than it fixes. I myself eliminated some crashes, after getting rid of it, when roaming the lands. Use OblivionDisplayTweaks instead with all it's features - no matter if some claim, that OSR or another mod may do one or two things better. Mixing them up, and deactivating some settings in the one or other is generally a bad idea. I tried it, and tested it thoroughly.
And generally, get the "EngineBugFixes" and "Blue's Engine Fixes" too.
Again, with other places, or dungeons or locations, you may need different values - I haven't tested it throughout the whole game yet, after this point forward. But it may be likely, that the same values, may not work the same well everywhere. Keep this in mind.
Conclusion or tl;dr
Don't overdo it with trying to ask Oblivion to use a lot of this or that. Don't overreserve memory for heap and more cell buffers or preload caches. These suggestions came initially from vanilla players, a modded version behaves very different! It's gonna cause Oblivion have less memory available for other things to load, like for bigger and more textures and other data. This leads then to missing black textures, which couldn't be loaded, or even crashes. A stable setup is created mostly around the following variables:
iPreloadSizeLimit, uExterior Cell Buffer and uInterior Cell Buffer in Oblivion.ini DefaultHeapSize in MoreHeap.ini
General rule: Stay close to the defaults, increase values only one at a time and try, with only one or two of each value increased. Don't go multiply them several times, but only raise by very little at a time.
After thorough testing, this very mod unfortunately crashes every time the "bethesda menu" is on, right after launching the game. Would anyone know why? I was looking for a cell buffer purger :/
If you set a different pcb count value via the console, it will be lost the next time you start the game. It will then default back to zero which actually means it will purge on every loading screen.
If you want to permanently set pcb count to a different value, you can edit the mod with tes4edit. I did that and set pcb count value to 3. Works very well for me.
Wh...How?...months of crashes gone, my installation stable, oh by the divines, thank you thank you so very much, Im smiling and laughing as I write this, honestly thank you so very much.
Could this mod be made compatible to Fallout New Vegas cause those other (purge cell buffers) mods aren't that well made, and this one seemed to make make Oblivion run smooth for hours. It would be really helpful if you can. Great mod by the way!
This has been working quite well for me so far! I feel I have to summon companions through doors a bit more now, and I think that may have to do with this mod, but it's still worth it. Oblivion overall feels more stable to me with this this on. Thank you for this. endorsed.
One possible issue is that purging the buffer seems to stop enemies and some friendly NPCs from following you through doors/gates/etc. Some might think this a feature and not a bug, though.
First of all Quarn is brilliant and the idea of this mod is excellent.
However, after testing, it appears that this mod may be causing my game to crash. It doesn't affect my game when entering existing cities/buildings, but only when traveling outside of cities. After 5 loading screens the mod goes to purge the cells and my game ctd.
If it is something that I am doing (or that I could be doing) to cause this (or correct it) I would appreciate the feedback.
32 comments
Started having after some cell changes random black texture issues, after enhancing my mods more and more. It was easy to reproduce, by going in/out of the different shops in the imperial city. After passing some doors, black textures would randomly start to appear. After a bit more, a crash would occur.
After some experimenting and figuring out/understanding deeper, what some INI settings and tools/mods truely do, it turns out, that some suggestions are contra-productive.
The key to a very stable Oblivion setup, is to understand, how Oblivion is using the memory or rather, how or when it won't be able to use more
than it can access. Reserving more memory for things, which may not need it, or for the purpose of supposedly hoping to improve performance,
where it may not be needed these days, make less memory available for things where it's essential to be available or required.
Here's how to get this issue all stable. Really important: Always change ONLY ONE THING at a time, or you may never figure out what the most stable setup is.
More Heap is not always more stable (no pun intended lol) - less heap is better. Experiment with values between 512 and 1024, like 640, 768 and 832 (or add/subtract values like 64 and 32). 1024 is almost always too much! The reason for this is simple. With Oblivions memory limitations, less memory may be available for other things. My setup seems to do fine with 640, much less than I had before.
Another thing I realized is, it matters, how your cell buffers are used. The issue with the black textures, comes from the cell buffers. If Oblivion runs out of
memory for the cell buffers or is out of cell buffers (having too much heap available, may not trigger old cells cleaned up when needed maybe?), textures simply won't be able to be loaded, similar as if they were missing on disc.
Some may have increased in the Oblivion.ini file, the values for the variables uExterior Cell Buffer and uInterior Cell Buffer. Well, what many seem to miss is the fact, that this suggestion initially came from people running Oblivion un-modded, where it may very well improve things. Simply, because the vanilla data require less memory, and so may cache more cells in RAM. However, a modded Oblivion, will require more resources for each cell, so raising the cell buffers,
may hit several limits or make memory mechanisms not work as intended.
Here again, lower values for a modded or heavily modded Oblivion are better. I left exteriors to the default 36, and increased Interiors just up to 6. This seemed to be the perfect value, where 3 would work worse in other ways, and higher values would start causing these issues.
One other setting seemed also to help here a lot. After I tested with the console, purging cell buffers every time on cell changes, seemed also to not trigger the issue. Though, that is a BAD idea, as it eliminates anything cached in memory. However, setting bPreemptivelyUnloadCells to 1in combination with a good, not too high number of cell buffers, will trigger it not too often, yet often enough when needed. Even though in the past, this setting was often not suggested to change, ignore that suggestion, because it won't matter performance-wise with today's powerful hardware, but it will matter for stability! I do NOT suggest
though mods which purge after every loading, because these eliminate unintelligently all buffers instantly and causes constant reloading
between interiors/exteriors changes. Not something you want.
What else should you pay attention to?
Adjust also the variable iPreloadSizeLimit. I have set it to just 52428800 (and even though I've 32GB RAM) and works great. I tried with higher values, once again here too, set it too high, and issues will start appearing. WIth today's discs being so much faster than before 10-14 years, smaller preloading isn't an issue. The issue is rather with Oblivion, if it requests more memory to use, which may be not available anymore, because it can't use memory beyond the 4GB
memory space (oh yes, you patched your version for 4GB, correct?).
You should get rid of OSR. Seriously, get rid of it. I kept it alongside MoreHeap, because of people saying, that it still helps. That's not true. Actually, after some research OSR causes now with Windows 10 and 11 more crashes than it fixes. I myself eliminated some crashes, after getting rid of it, when roaming the lands. Use OblivionDisplayTweaks instead with all it's features - no matter if some claim, that OSR or another mod may do one or two things better. Mixing them up, and deactivating some settings in the one or other is generally a bad idea. I tried it, and tested it thoroughly.
And generally, get the "EngineBugFixes" and "Blue's Engine Fixes" too.
Again, with other places, or dungeons or locations, you may need different values - I haven't tested it throughout the whole game yet, after this
point forward. But it may be likely, that the same values, may not work the same well everywhere. Keep this in mind.
Conclusion or tl;dr
Don't overdo it with trying to ask Oblivion to use a lot of this or that. Don't overreserve memory for heap and more cell buffers or preload
caches. These suggestions came initially from vanilla players, a modded version behaves very different! It's gonna cause Oblivion have less
memory available for other things to load, like for bigger and more textures and other data. This leads then to missing black textures,
which couldn't be loaded, or even crashes. A stable setup is created mostly around the following variables:
iPreloadSizeLimit, uExterior Cell Buffer and uInterior Cell Buffer in Oblivion.ini
DefaultHeapSize in MoreHeap.ini
General rule: Stay close to the defaults, increase values only one at a time and try, with only one or two of each value increased. Don't go multiply
them several times, but only raise by very little at a time.
Would anyone know why? I was looking for a cell buffer purger :/
If you set a different pcb count value via the console, it will be lost the next time you start the game. It will then default back to zero which actually means it will purge on every loading screen.
If you want to permanently set pcb count to a different value, you can edit the mod with tes4edit. I did that and set pcb count value to 3. Works very well for me.
However, after testing, it appears that this mod may be causing my game to crash. It doesn't affect my game when entering existing cities/buildings, but only when traveling outside of cities. After 5 loading screens the mod goes to purge the cells and my game ctd.
If it is something that I am doing (or that I could be doing) to cause this (or correct it) I would appreciate the feedback.