I'm having a bit of trouble in certain areas with NPC's faces disappearing in Skyrim on PC. It's very odd because their skin and eyes are no where to be found but their facial hair stays intact. It's a very troubling problem, as you can see:
Yup, he's definitely seen better days. Is anyone else experiencing this odd glitch? Any suggestions to fix this issue?
Update: It's become an epidemic! Now no one has a face. Please help!
Various anecdotes on the Bethsoft forums* indicate that this is a symptom of a low-memory problem. This seems to be the same problem that causes missing or purple textures, stuttering, and crashes-to-desktop (CTDs).
One solution is to lower your graphics settings to fit into a smaller memory footprint. Another (if you have in excess of 2GB of memory installed) is to enable the Large Address Awareness flag on the TESV.exe executable.
* No single good link I can find, just lots of offhand references.
I had this problem also, I fixed it by changing the Texture Quality setting from High to Medium.
I can't honestly tell the different, but it's cleared up all the miscellaneous texture issues I was having.
