After observing and reading carefully everything in this topic, i think it's time to share my two cents.
I don't get error messages, it is just freezing with sound going in choppy loop cycle. The only things that helps is hardware reset.
In one of the cases, but just one - after the game crashed i've got the Doom 3 engine console with error messages filled. Just after a seconds the machine has restarted and i couldn't obtain any usefull information at all, one the could help resolve or get a workaround for this.
Since then, the engine system console (which exists in all id Games since Quake 3), i've never managed to get it and/or analyse it at all.
The crashes are constant, and practicaly i've gave up trying to play "Prey" for the moment.
Here are the things i've tried -
- updating to the latest sound drivers (Creative Audigy 2 Value)
- updating the 6600GT drivers from nVidia to the latest one, even tried with the latest beta - 91.33, but with no any luck at all. Then i got back to the latest 91.31 revision.
- updating the nForce chipset (3) drivers to the 5.11 (i was with an obsolete old version), but this also didn't resolve anything
- lowering couple a levels the sound hardware acceleration
- removing the Audigy 2 card from the slot and switching to the cursed AC'97 integrated audio
- borrowing and replacing my own two pieces of A-Data VITESTA DDR400 RAM modules (2x512 mb) with a Kingston from a friend
- switching the A-Datas and the Kingstons through different DIMM slots, even combining both of them. Extensive memory checks on the both pairs of memory modules, showed no failures or memory checksums at all. I'm saying that, with one idea - the problem is a hardware compatibility issue, but IT'S definitely not in any individual hardware component - i assume it's a mixed effect from couple of factors, which i guess triggers some memory leak or something which causes the freezing. Also - THIS is the only game currently installed on my computer which behave like this.
- updating to the latest Dx9.0 binaries.
- unloaded all other system proceses, trying to free as much resourses as i can, to do a "clean boot" with the game.
- currently i also have, Quake 4, Doom 3 - RoE installed, which never caused such problems
After crashing and cold rebooting the mchine, i've looked at the event logs on my machines, but there were no usefull info for the crash at all. The machine even doesn't reacts like it was restarted because of the hardware problem (as we all known it does with the message "The system has recovered from serious system crash" generated by Windows XP Professional).
I have and another ideas, and i'll try them ASAP, when i have the time - to run the game, trough Sysinternals FileMon and RegMon apps, but i think it will be useless. Nevertheless i'll try that too.
Still i think, that it is a glitch in the engine or scripting code. Don't know.
Also i do not dismiss fully the idea that it could be a sound hardware/drivers/game link issue, since the thing i've noted for the last couple of days reading around the topic is that most of us has a Creative SoundBlaster cards.. Don't know if that helps.
One last things to ask the guys from Humand head - is there anyway, to make the game generating some runtime log which i could examine or send to you after all, i think it will be helpfull to examine and squash the problem
)
Best regards
C'est Moi
P.S: Nothing in the machine is overcloked - the RAM is in normal latency, neither the CPU has been tweaked, neither the GPU core and GPU's Memory clocks.