Prey (2017) Crash to Desktop fix, Performance, Lagging, Audio, FPS improvement and more solution

By Faheem Haydar On May 5, 2017

Today, Prey (2017) has been released for PC, Xbox One and PS4. It is one of the most anticipated titles for this year. The studio responsible for the development of this title is Arkane, the same company who developed Dishonored 2 which was badly optimized for the PC platform. Now it seems that Prey is also having similar type of issues related to game crashing, freezing or lagging etc.

To fix all this problems we have prepared below few tips and solutions. But before that, check that your PC meets with the game’s minimum and recommended system requirements first, as listed below:

MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit versions)
Processor: Intel i5-2400, AMD FX-8320
Memory: 8GB RAM
Graphics: GTX 660 2GB, AMD Radeon 7850 2GB
Storage: 20 GB available space

RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit versions)
Processor: Intel i7-2600K, AMD FX-8350
Memory: 16GB RAM
Graphics: GTX 970 4GB, AMD R9 290 4GB
Storage: 20 GB available space

Prey (2017) Crash to Desktop fix:

First and the basic troubleshooting method for any game’s crash to desktop issue is to install the latest graphics driver in your PC. You can get the latest drivers for your graphics card either from Nvidia website or AMD site, depending on the graphics card model that you have.

Other than that, try to verify the game cache in your Steam client for this game for random crash fix. If the game is crashing after every 10-15 minutes then try to open Task Manager and go to the Services tab and here disable TabletInputService.

Prey crashing problem may also occur if the save game file goes corrupt. So, try to load from an automatic save game file from the start of a mission. You can also try to turn off anti-aliasing by going into the graphics settings.

Prey Freezing solution:

If the game is freezing at random intervals then try to update your graphics driver or either roll them back to an older version to check the differences while playing. Other than that you can also try to disable V-sync, turn off Triple buffering, set the FPS to a lower rate by going into the game option or play the game in Windowed Borderless mode.

Prey Lagging and Stuttering issue fix:

If, on your PC, Prey is lagging or stuttering too much while gameplay, then simply go to desktop and then open Task Manager and right click on Prey.exe. After that you need to set its CPU priority from Normal to High. This will decrease the CPU consumption by around 50%.

No Audio or Dialogues in Prey solution:

Many people have reported that there is a major issue with no audio or dialogues in Prey. To fix this issue, you will have to completed close the game and exit out of Steam. After that restart your pc entirely and check if this solves the problem. If still nothing, then try to perform a clean install of DirectX from Microsoft directly. A patch to solve this issue will be soon provided by Bethesda.

If the sound is missing or if there is no sound at all then it also happens due to changing in-game graphics settings. So, to solve this problem, just press Alt+Tab twice and your audio will be back.

How to change FOV setting through config file:

Below is the information given on Steam to change FOV Setting via config file:

Prey will support CrossFire and SLI, as well as offer ultra-widescreen support at 21:9 at launch for PC players. Updated drivers will be available from AMD and NVIDIA and we’ll be sharing more on those as they release. FOV can be adjusted via a config file and will be accessible via the Options menu in a coming update. During the final phases of testing, we found some bugs we would like to address before officially supporting it, but we wanted you to be able to play with it now! See below for info.

1. To enable FOV, edit the game.cfg file in notepad. The file is located in the root Prey folder in your Save Games folder (likely c:\users\\Saved Games\Arkane Studios\Prey )
2. Look for cl_hfov = 85.5656
3. 85 is the default horizontal FOV setting, but it can be replaced with values up to 120. (Note – some of the issues we are working on are more noticeable with higher FOV.)