Well I have a new X 1950 XTX, 512Mb GDDR4 and it works a treat.

I used to use nVidia, had no problems there either.

The cooling point was a good one, but my card has its own fan. My system has 2Gb DDR2 @ 667, so it's capable of handling it all.

I hold off buying until I can afford something mean, then I build it all at once from scratch. Latest rig is the first I've had since 2000 when I bought a P4 866 which was, believe it or not, pretty 'top end' performance at the time.

The Athlon FX-62 dual core with the graphics and RAM above is my latest version, and I'm expecting it to last for some years.

Thanks again for all your advice.
I will probably go for an Nvidia card this time (to be on the safe side). As of the nvidia card I mentioned earlier I read somewhere that a power supply of 400W was not a bad idea considering its power consumption. Well I have a 350W power supply and a P4 3GHz processor and since I bought them recently I will wait a while for another upgrade and thus have to look for a videocard that is performance wise more or less in balance with my cpu. With a relatively underperforming cpu you don't get a better overall performance, I suppose. I don't know how one determines this, but probably an nvidia card that compares with a 9800 pro or something like that I think. If I can still obtain such a card that is.
An overheating videocard was not the case as with the Omegadrivers the screen goes black within one minute or so (and then the game continues judging on the sound).

I have a 350 watt power supply, and it can take care of 1 XFX 7900 GS 256MB, 1,5 gig DDR SDRAM, 2 sata disks, audigy soundcard, dvd-r rom and an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (2,4ghz).

But I guess it will have to go when I get more RAM and a even better graphics card. (Although the 7900GS is freakin awesome, just got it, and GW runs smooth as silk in 1600x1200 with full antialiasing and anisoptric filtering)

I'm runing a Radeon 9600XT Platimum -256MB, and It's been working fine for me. Even with the sea floor turned on frame rates only start to drop a little in harbour.

If you do run with the Omega drivers though, make sure you COMPLETELY remove any ATI drivers first. You can't mix and match drivers, they will give you grief.

BTW, anybody got a clue as to AGP aperture settings. What exactly do they do? Is there a sweet spot?

I am currently running SH3 W/ GW on a ATI 9600 pro 128 mb card with 1.5GB RAM ,2.8G P4 processor with all in all no problems. During certain times like the periscope issue of being wet when you first rise it above the waves i have a frame rate slow down.
I did have SH3 commander and had a lot of crashes but i reinstalled a fresh SH3 W/ 1.4 patch and just put GW on top of it. I have completed around 10 missions with no problems at all.

Mine didnt give me problems until "late in the war" either.

I guess its all the extra spotlight and flare action from the added escorts and lights on the merchantmen....etc.

Thats a lot of shading to draw.

I run SHIII with GW mods through a Saphire Radeon 9800+ Pro with Omega drivers using the auto-overclocking and 1.50 Gb DDR. Apart from some drop in FPS around ports the game generaly runs fine. Others have sugested that oveheating may be a cause, my thoughts also. Depending on your budget of course I would definitely sugest trying Zalman AGP and CPU coolers. Also chipset coolers on the AGP card memory chips. http://www.zalman.co.kr/
My other specs: Asrock KV7VT4A Pro MB, Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD and AMD Sempron 3000+ cpu.

I find your last sentence interesting(and then the game contiues judging on the sound). What do you mean. I know sometimes that some sounds will loop a few times and slow or stop the game. Perhaps a sound card issue or MB sound issue?


I run GW mod with AMD3200+/1 gig RAM/Nvidia 6200OC 256MB/sound provided by MB(Mboard made by Nivida)...with exception of slight choppy port performance that everyone seems to get, I have no other issues. Particle density is at 100%. I have had comments on my screenshot post that my pics are crystal clear and sharp! I have had Nvidia cards on every computer I have owned and will never change from Nvidia. Just a good card. Clue us in on that last comment of yours concerning sound...possibly your issue????

I have a soundblaster Live soundcard (onboard sound disabled of course).
What happens is: the game stalls, then the screen goes black, after a short while the sound and the game continues as it were as I am able to fire a torpedo e.g. and hear other sounds as well.
This happened on most occassions, perhaps on all, but this is so annoying that I immediately kill the game. It is rather puzzling, and Ubisoft still hasn't taken any trouble to answer my question. It is perhaps worth the gamble to buy a new videocard (120 euro costs for a 20 euro game, anyway it is probably worth it).

I run SHIII on lower specs than you: Radeon 9600Xt 128Mb, 512Mb RAM, 2.8GHz PIV.
Make sure to patch SHIII to its most current version 1.4.

I had crashes when first palying SHIII but it went away. Here's what i did
For me disable the music. Don't add anything to the gramaphone folder. It will crash your campaign. And once it crash once it WILL crash again for sure. DELETE that campaign and start new one and don't repeat that mistake(adding files to gramaphone folders). Better not to even play the original gramaphone music or rename that original music file so it won't get loaded. It solves my problem permanently. Never had a crash since! except when i add some music files to the gramaphone folder.

Good luck. remember you're running SHIII with twice the RAM that i do.

I'm not a soundblaster fan. I have run into issue with that card concerning other games. Try this, disable the soundblaster card and let the Motherboard run the sound or just disable the soundblaster and see if the issue goes away. If so, then I would suspect the sound card is problem. Perhaps reduce the hardward exceleration on the sound card if you can

Run DXdiag and turn off hardware acceleration on your soundcard. Causes a lot of crashes.

I see Nipples seconds my opinion on the sound card. These do cause issue. Now if Nipples would only tell me the story behind his knick name Nipplesthecat. Thank God his knick name is not ILIKESHEEP. That is self explanatory:rotfl:

Oops I didnt see that you had already posted that. Yes I second that.

P.S. We all have our secrets.

i run SH3 on a HP Laptop 3.0Ghz P4, 1.2G RAM, and a ATI Mobility 9000 card 128mb shared. it works fine, i tuned it so that it focussed on performance rather than graphics but it plays and i get great fun out of it. Your vid card is probably burned out or something is wrong with it. I doubt its because of the model of videocard since i can run my game on such a ****ty card