S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SOC - Game Crashing

[arroyjose]

How often does S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SOC crash? Are crashes just expected as part of playing the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series?

Finally got around to starting this game today, and within an hour it froze. I couldn't even bring up Windows taskbar to kill the game. A few more details: Complete 2009 is installed and all the settings are set to Highest/Max.

Are there any settings I need to have to make the game not crash?

[Bad_Motha]

Stalker can really stress your GPU, try monitoring your video card temps.

Try lowering the texture quality by one notch lower then max. I had a system with 8800 GTS and SOC and CS would freeze whenever I put texture quality at max. Lower by a single notch helped and I could play for many hours without any crashing.

But most likely your issue is temps. So check that.