surrender
 

All the tries after the very first install have been without gwx, stock sh3 w/ 1.4 patch.

I also ran that tuneup thing but unfortunately that did not help.:damn:

I am thinking I may just be one of the unlucky ones that has something installed that is conflicting with sh3. I just have no idea what it is. I mostly run games on my comp so its not like i'm doing anything unusual. :damn:

So for now, untill i get my new system built in a few weeks I will just be onshore looking enviously at everyone else sailing away. and no. i will not reinstall windows just to try and get sh3 to run. too much good stuff on the drive. ;)


edit: sweet I'm a Nub now! ;P

2nd edit: Just for "fun" i tried the first single player mission, in non full screen mode, sink the barham or something like that and had task manager running to monitor usage stats. The game was using high 90's cpu the whole time and the mem usage was continually climbing untill at about 1g mem usage the game just ctd. so yeah. end of my little "adventure". i have put prolly 10 hours into this thing just trying to get it to work. and just for the record i am in no way blaming gwx for messing anything up. some people may construe my first post as saying gwx caused the problems. i doubt it.

re:CPU usage
 

Hi Demo.
Have you recently installed a cheap webcam?
Because I had a similar problem with my cpu cycles being used 90-100%, making playing a game impossible (it was Rainbow6 Vegas...by the way).
When I ran Task Manager - based on a tip from the Ubisoft forums - I found out that it was a little file called "vm-sti.exe", part of the software of a cheap-assed webcam that I installed, which for reasons unknown, hi-jacks almost 100% of the cpu cycles after 30 minutes. I searched online and found many references to this particular issue.
I deleted this file and had no more problems.
I hope its this simple for you as well.
Cheers
Ceedub

:up: Thanks for the tip(s). But nope, unfortunately I have gotten quite good at reading task manager and nothing unusual or extra is running when i'm running stock sh3. I wish it was something simple but ehh... I guess one really can't win them all after all. i will update if i try something different that works but for now, i'm sunk.

May I suggest FileMon from Sysinternals?

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...k/Filemon.mspx

It can capture pretty much all file activity while minimized which then the data can be sliced and diced to identify the nasty bugger. It has helped me mucho in the past...and best of all, it's FREE!

Gordon

It is normal for D3D applications to consume all available CPU time, don't worry about it.

However, GWX does increase the demands of the system as the textures are quite a bit higher quality. Even on a 6800GT w/ 256MB RAM texture swapping can occur. Nothing you can really do about that besides replace the video card with either something significantly faster or with more memory.