Single player errors and crashes

[Blín D'ñero]

That is an old cheap budget PSU from 2005. Does it have a pci-express power cable?
It has:

Power Supply Connectors:
1 x 20/24pin Main Power
2 x SATA
1 x 12V (P4)
6 x Peripheral
2 x Floppy

Your card should be fed 75 W through the PCi-e slot and for the rest it needs a pci-e power-cable.

[goteki45]

The version I have has:

1 x Main connector (20+4Pin)
1 x 12V (P4)
6 x Peripheral
2 x SATA
1 x PCI-E
2 x Floppy

I played through the game on the lowest settings, when I reached the area in Dead Man's Trail where you get the crystal back there were graphic anomalies and the game crashed when I tried to save. Parts of the screen turned gray and there were static-looking lines in some areas, and my framerates fell very low. It almost seemed like it would be the response to overheating, but my card's temperature at the time was 54C, and my computer's ambient temperature was 38C - both fairly low temperatures.

[Blín D'ñero]

The symptoms of an underfed card. I wouldn't consider that PSU trustworthy to feed a gaming PC.

[Blín D'ñero]

Here, a forum conversation about that PSU, same symptoms, and a good advice!

Do yourself a favour and never go cheap on the PSU! Buy a decent Corsair 650 W, they're not expensive but very reliable.
To see your fine card, and your whole PC, perform at its full potential.

[goteki45]

Why would this come about from Dark Messiah and not games like Mass Effect, Unreal Tournament 3, Oblivion, or Left 4 Dead? I'm not doubting your answer, I'm just wondering why an older game would bring this problem up instead of a newer one.

[Blín D'ñero]

Different game's engines, different behaviour. DM is very demanding with its high resolution high quality textures and very big files. It's a heavy load on the RAM, virtual memory and the card. And the CPU.
To have such low profile PSU powering your PC (all components) while performing such task, it is expected to give the result you are suffering now. That some games show much less impact from this doesn't say much. Totally different demands per game. One of the first things to do when assembling a gaming-PC is making sure the Power Supply Unit is of high quality build and can deliver stable and more than enough (for even more headroom during peaks) power to all the components.
From that base, if you then still get performance problems you know there is something else not right. But the PC's performance starts with a good hardware base. Which in your case is not good.
But you can run Dark Messiah, though at lowered settings.

[goteki45]

Ok, I'll be ordering a CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W supply in the next few days. If it solves the issue I'll be very happy, and if not, at least I'll be able to add more SATA devices or a higher-end video card down the line if I want

I'll post back here once it's installed, thanks for all your help so far

[Blín D'ñero]

Yes post back please. I expect your issue will be solved by this.

With the new Corsair PSU, on your hardware (and videocard) you should be able to play the game at maximum settings.

[goteki45]

New PSU is installed, but there are still errors with the game

First try:
I start a new game, it crashes right after the guard notices the cyclops behind you when you reach Stonehelm with both the "IDirect3DDevice9:: present()" and "The Instruction at 0x####### referenced memory at 0x#######. The memory could not be 'read'." errors.

many false starts:
I toggle a few things on my computer, setting Audio Acceleration to none prevents the game from even starting, so I put it back to full.

Second try:
After the camera pans around the Shantiri Crystal in its chamber in the prologue and goes back to Phenrig's chambers there are graphical oddities, the Crystal itself was pure yellow and the wall or desk behind it turned black, then the game crashed with a Bink error saying that the video was not a bink file, and another "The Instruction at 0x####### referenced memory at 0x#######. The memory could not be 'read'." error.

[Blín D'ñero]

Aha. But these OBVIOUSLY have another cause. This reads like you have various corruptions going on. 'Not a bink file'???
It's now a matter of getting the settings right. Without a dedicated soundcard, but onboard soundchip, you MUST have the hardware acceleration at basic or none.
Then apply the snd_mixahead 0.2 or 0.3 in your cfg file (as described in this post item =8=).

Having only 2 GB RAM and a 512 MB videocard.... try

Open the registry editor:
Click Start > Run, type in
regedit

then hit Enter.
In the Registry, navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Double click on "PagedPoolSize". Change the (hexadecimal) Value Data to:

10000000

this will set 256MB Paged Pool size.

Reboot the PC.

Also try: in the game launch options, apply the
-dxlevel 95
parameter, to make sure the hardware DX9.0c level of your card is recognized. You should see DirectX v9.0+