Penumbra: Overture mid-game crash - JENS TAKE A LOOK PLEASE

[Bludo]

Possibly try and reinstall the game and do not apply any patches or changing exes or similar. The game is up-to-date and with everything at its best by default in Steam. Then to be sure, do a check file integrity check on the new game install in Steam.

If you experience crashes, first go to nvidia.com and download the latest drivers for your graphics card. Install, reboot and see if that helps.

If not, then think of 3rd party applications that could interfere. This could be anti-virus programs, 3d accelerated effects in the windows user interface or even the steam overlay. It could also be some sort of misconfiguration in the system files, as you had to run the game as an administrator in order for it to save. This could indicate something else is wrong and not completely fixed by running as an administrator.

Your reccomendations have all been attempted. I have done numerous clean installs of both the game and my drivers (even installing to a fresh Windows install just to see). I realize it is probably low on the priority list because I'm one of a few people reporting it, but I have a hard time seeing how there is not an issue in the material system. The game doesn't appear to be using any procedural textures, and particles don't produce any kind of a noticable problem. It seems almost exclusively isolated to issues when loading shaders and calculating lighting.

Also, another strange anomaly that occurs is that when the shader settings are set to Very Low, some of the textures, if they are unlit, draw entirely black. Turning on the glowstick will force draw everything within the view of the frustum. But it's not uncommon to see a scene drawing almost entirely black without some sort of dynamic light source in view.