Nvidia 6200 Video Card & SH3

[K-61]

I bought my brother a copy of SH3 last year. He never really got into it at the time, but now that GWX is out, I have sold him on the idea of giving SH3 a try. I went to his house tonight and installed SH3 for him. The game loads fine, but it will not load past a certain point once you try to do something. I tried to go into the naval academy and do a frame rate count, but it rebooted the computer when it began to load. I can get to the options screen and choose what I want to do, but once it starts to load the academy exercise it locks or reboots. I tried a number of things, including reinstalling or deleting the intro videos but to no avail.

He has recently replace his old video card with an Nvidia 6200, which may be the culprit. His Civ4 crashes, too. I installed the card myself along with the most recent driver set from Nvidia's website. His computer did run SH3 a while back, long before he installed this new card, so I know his machine can run it. He has a P4 @ 2.66 GHz, 2 GB of RAM. The video card has 256 MB.

I looked around for advice about this but haven't had any luck. I'm hoping someone here might have some advice. Thanks.

[Fenris_Wolf]

This might be an issue with the power supply unit not feeding enough juice to the video card. Most cards around that one require a 350+ watts PSU minimum to operate if I remember correctly. What was the card that was replaced by the 6200?:hmm: This can also happen if the power supply in your home / area is struggling due to load.

Best thing to try other than this is to re-install windows. It'll take care of any viruses / trojans / missing files / ghost drivers etc. After that be sure to get the latest motherboard drivers and use 97.92 (or there about) nvidia drivers.

[Nerazzurri]

I have a 6200 and it doesn't crash or freeze mate (although I do have frame rate issues! So if you do get it going I'd like to know what rate you're achieving).

You don't mention if you're loading the game as stock, patched, GWX or using Commander??

If it's GWX with or without Commander I'd be more inclined to bin and re-install them rather than re-do windows.

Other than that, the only thing I've heard of is removing the intro movies but you've already did that :doh: Sorry I've got no other suggestions for you mate.

[JU_88]

I used to have a 6600GT and that would play stock flawlessly but struggeled with the larger convoys and busy ports found in the supermods - AA had a habit of disabling itself when things got too busy.
I now have 7600GT - with that, the worst i ever get is about 15 fps, bearing in mind when I upgraded my card I aslo upgraded my memory from 1gb to 2gb.

[AVGWarhawk]

I ran SH3 with GWX on a 6200. No problems at all with it. Might be another issue somewhere else.

[The Munster]

I used to have a 6600GT and that would play stock flawlessly but struggeled with the larger convoys and busy ports found in the supermods - AA had a habit of disabling itself when things got too busy.
I now have 7600GT - with that, the worst i ever get is about 15 fps, bearing in mind when I upgraded my card I aslo upgraded my memory from 1gb to 2gb.

Think I'll do a similar thing in the New Year and upgrade from my 6800 to :hmm:
Might also upgrade the memory as well from 1gb to 2gb if it's not too difficult to do.

[kiwi_2005]

I bought my brother a copy of SH3 last year. He never really got into it at the time, but now that GWX is out, I have sold him on the idea of giving SH3 a try. I went to his house tonight and installed SH3 for him. The game loads fine, but it will not load past a certain point once you try to do something. I tried to go into the naval academy and do a frame rate count, but it rebooted the computer when it began to load. I can get to the options screen and choose what I want to do, but once it starts to load the academy exercise it locks or reboots. I tried a number of things, including reinstalling or deleting the intro videos but to no avail.

He has recently replace his old video card with an Nvidia 6200, which may be the culprit. His Civ4 crashes, too. I installed the card myself along with the most recent driver set from Nvidia's website. His computer did run SH3 a while back, long before he installed this new card, so I know his machine can run it. He has a P4 @ 2.66 GHz, 2 MB of RAM. The video card has 256 MB.

I looked around for advice about this but haven't had any luck. I'm hoping someone here might have some advice. Thanks.

You should have no trouble with the 6200 card in fact looking at your specs its the same as my older PC except my CPU was an AMD 2.6. But i owned what was considered the worse version to come out for the 6200 cards the ones with just a heatsink and no fan yet she ran GWX 1.1 & 1.3 with no problems in 1280x1204 window mode.

I would defrag the hdd, update the 6200 drivers to the latest for that version and try again.

Good luck!

[TomcatMVD]

I have a GeForce 6200LE and no prob.
I don't know what monitor you have, but I had some launch problems, fixed after I right clicked on SHIII.exe, and chose run under 800X1200 (I don't remember if those are the right numbers but there's only one such option), you run the game, then exit it, and uncheck that option. That worked for me, however, you are not having the exact same problem, but if your screen happens to be an LCD, may want to give it a try.

[JU_88]

I used to have a 6600GT and that would play stock flawlessly but struggeled with the larger convoys and busy ports found in the supermods - AA had a habit of disabling itself when things got too busy.
I now have 7600GT - with that, the worst i ever get is about 15 fps, bearing in mind when I upgraded my card I aslo upgraded my memory from 1gb to 2gb.

Think I'll do a similar thing in the New Year and upgrade from my 6800 to :hmm:
Might also upgrade the memory as well from 1gb to 2gb if it's not too difficult to do.

Memory is the easiest thing to upgrade in a pc - just make sure buy the right type.
Go for a Gerforce 8 series card if you can as the Geforce 7 series is well on the way out. (since the 7's are not DX10 compatible they not a very good purchase anymore.)

[K-61]

I'm thinking the PSU may not be up to the job. My brother's system went from a 64 MB card to a 256. I have a spare PSU in my inventory, so next time I go up to visit him I'll take it along and see if it helps. I tried both stock SH3 and GWX2; both installations had the same problem. The hard drive is defragged, though I really can't see that as being a cause for any program crashing. And reinstalling Windows is not necessary; it was just done a week ago and there are no viruses or whatever causing this.

[siber]

...2 MB of RAM...

I've found the problem! :know:..... :hmm:..... :rotfl:

Actually, I haven't got anything constructive to add... Sorry.

[K-61]

...2 MB of RAM...

I've found the problem! :know:..... :hmm:..... :rotfl:

Actually, I haven't got anything constructive to add... Sorry.

Ha, good one! I never even noticed that. Well, thanks to you it has now been corrected to read, "2GB."