GWX 3.Gold or Knight’s Cross? (Not anymore)
 

I don’t know which of these I shouid download, which one is better?

Also, I’m quite new to SH3… it’s such a good game!

Welcome aboard!
 

My thoughts
 

I have played all variations of GWX and settled on the Knights Edition, it is very easy to install and the graphics and the user interface is excellent.
There is a good video on youtube by wolfpack I think that walks you through it and if you have an NVIDIA card there is also an extra to improve graphics.

I also use Voice Attack for immersion and there are some great SH3 profiles out there to use with it.

My only minor complaint is that it does not support SH3 Commander which has some neat option features.

I recommend it.

Thanks! I wasn’t sure what’s the difference but now I know. Will download it for sure.

Welcome to Subsim, Blesk.

Sink'em all! :arrgh!:

Thank you! I’m glad that I found this game and community.

Do you have a profile for Voice Attack for SH3/GWX KC? (that you wish to share?)

Couple of things

1. KCE is easy to install and run. With one caveat - if you've an Intel graphics card, it will likely CTD within 5 - 10 mins. GUI is beautiful and there are a lot of aids built in.

2. If you've the time and will, going with a clean install, applying the 4GB patch, installing GWX 3.0, and manually applying a bunch of mods (widescreen GUI, merchant fleet mid, uboats compilation, environmental mods, gameplay mods, etc.) along with patches and updates to those mods (some mods come in different flavors for GWX, WAC, LSH, NYGM, etc.), then applying the hsie and stiebler patches *can* result in a more tailored experience that you like better. It can also result in a mod soup mess that CTDs.

On my older PC, I have a highly customized mod soup on top of a GWX 3.0 base. Very stable. I also had to install KCE on my old PC because my new PC has an Intel arc a770 and KCE CTDs within 5 minutes of start of career. I also on my new PC have a non-hsie GWX 3.0 with Ahnenerbe WSgui install that is stable. I play all of them.

If you just want to get going fast and don't have an Intel graphics issue, KCE is the way to go.

OTOH, if you want to spend hours searching subsim forums, downloading a bunch of mods, tinkering, and then getting exactly what you want, then go with GWX 3.0. I'll just say that it probably took over 100 hrs worth of tinkering on my old PC over the course of several years for me to get my GWX 3.0 mod soup just right.

I found this in the "AI" hits results:
"Intel Arc GPUs don't natively support DX9, so they need to work harder to run these games.

This means that GPUs with lower performance might outperform Intel's offerings on DX9 games.

D3D9on12 is an open-source mapping layer that helps make DX9 compatible with Intel Arc GPUs.

The native DirectX 9 implementation is designed to work with specific games, such as Guild Wars 2 and Stellaris.

For other DX9 titles, the Arc GPU will use emulation."

As usual with all things'computer', your mileage may vary...

Yep. Every time I try and run KCE on my new XPS 8960 that I got last year, it CTDs with faults on kernel.dll and igd9trinity32.dll.

That latter dll is part of the GPU drivers for my card. It's a Dell OEM card rather than a retail card, so I'm reluctant to move up from the Dell 32.0.101.6129, A00 drivers to the generic 32.0.101.6647 drivers that Intel just released.

Other than SH3 KCE, the card has been a solid performer, but is like to move up to an Nvidia card. But good luck trying to buy a dell OEM card by itself and installing a retail card means turning off secureboot...

Make sure compatibility to Windows 7
 

I have run GWX KC on my daughter's Nvidia 4070 based machine.
If I set the compatibility mode for sh3.exe to Windows XP (64 bit I think) I got a CTD after about 5 minutes. No problems with compatibility mode to Windows 7 (as recommended). i guess this is DirectX 9 related?

It is - the new Intel GPU cards can't handle dx9 natively.

wrap music
 

The widescreen mods use a directX wrapper (d3d9.dll plus d3d9.ini) to override the display mode set by sh3.exe and force it to the one required by the mod.
The wrapper used by GWX KC seems a bit limited as it does not allow running in a window or scaling the display to fit a low resolution monitor. Maybe "sub-optimal" was seen as a good thing in this context :haha:
We are now getting CTD's with intel GPU's.



There's a whole bunch of directX wrappers out there, which go from directX 9 to directX 12 or OpenGL or Vulkan and can preumably force the display mode as well. As a general rule we are not pushing the boundaries as regards performance so we do not necessarily need a super efficient solution.


I was thinking about trying a directX to Vulkan wrapper. This might give folks a few more options (but might not sit happily with very old hardware). Has anyone tried this?


Can I ask where the GWX guys got the wrapper from? it does not seem to have any copyright/ownership details in the dll file.

Is it planned the support of SH3 Commander in future?

Good question. I'm not a dll guru. From what I understand, part of the problem with the Intel cards is that they use the open source dxvk (directx to vulkan) in their drivers and it is part of the cause of the issue. I suspect it is also why I've had issues trying to get Dragon Age Origins to run.

If you're able to recommend a wrapper (dx to vulkan, dx9 to dx11 or 12), I'm certainly willing to replace the existing dll and ini and give it a go.