Consistant Freezing

[Paleforce]

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OVERVIEW

Within 5-10 minutes after loading into game and leaving main menu, game freezes. The event will start with 1 or 2 large frametime spikes that correct in under a second. On the third or fourth, the game will freeze, lurch out a few more frames before freezing again, and then the UI disappears. Audio continues at this point, but game stays frozen until forced to close. Before all this, shader compilation otherwise will have run smoothly at main menu with no errors or warnings in CommunityShaders.log.

Very occasionally, a test run will result in 4-5 of these frametime spike with no freeze, and gameplay can continue as normal. But this has happened perhaps twice out of 40-50 test runs.

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DEPENDENCIES AND SETTINGS

Attempted testing with CS 1.4.6, 1.4.5, and 1.4.2 - all the same story.

Running SkyrimSE 1.5.97, Community Shaders 1.4.6, latest NVIDIA drivers (581.57) on a mobile RTX 3070, latest Windows 11 updates, latest 1.5.97 SSE Engine Fixes, and the latest release of each CS component. All dependencies are installed and up to date, no ENB or Reshade files are present in my game directory. Here are my NVIDIA driver settings for the game:

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TESTING

I have disabled every component one at a time, tried many different combos of settings, disabled and reenabled frame gen and upscaling separately, and freezing only ceases when the core Community Shaders mod is disabled.

(Should add I am somewhat experienced modder - no experience with shader programming though lol - and have an otherwise stabled and tuned load order; for the life of me can't think of anything else or any other recent load order changes that would cause this.)

Usually, the game only freezes. One time, however, the game managed to crash after freezing which finally gave me a .NETScriptFramework log to work with:

Crash_2025_10_20_23-25-0.txt

The log references no objects as a likely source, and the probable callstack are all rendering .dll's like:

[6] 0x7FF88687B47C (nvwgf2umx.dll+76B47C)
[7] 0x7FF8976207BD (dxgi.dll+107BD)
[9] 0x7FF89ADEE8D7 (KERNEL32.DLL+2E8D7)
[10] 0x7FF89C9EC53C (ntdll.dll+8C53C)
[11] 0x7FF8868BECCC (nvwgf2umx.dll+7AECCC)

File also begins with:

Unhandled native exception occurred at 0x7FF8868B181E (nvwgf2umx.dll+7A181E) on thread 17412!

My understanding is this .dll is part of the NVIDIA drivers. So the freezing seems to pertain to something in the rendering pipeline, not some obvious load order conflict.

The only thing I can think would cause issues is something to do with PBR textures and mesh. I recently downloaded several popular PBR mods that don't have any such issues reported in their comment sections, and ran PG Patcher with these settings:

Then ran latest dyndolod and ran Reqtificator for Requiem. xEdit shows no errors on my whole load order, everything looks like it checks out. All PBR textures and parallax effects look wonderful, everything working as planned... except then it freezes.

At a loss here.