New guy, some questions
 

When I first load the game, it takes around a minute and a half. Is that normal? That's the longest loading time I've ever seen on a game. I've got 1.5 GB of memory, so I don't know why it would take so long. Once I get in the game, it runs fine and everything looks great.

Also, the mouse doesn't feel quite natural, it moves a little sluggish. I can still manage it okay, I just don't know why it's like this. Anyone else have this problem or know what's going on? Thanks.

yea Loading time for the game is long. As for the mouse thing, I dont know.

Maybe the RAM, more than the hard drive?

You can always click through the opening sequences, although I often like to play them before preparing myself for another patrol.

Could also be your mouse needs a clean? If it's the rolling ball type, that can get sticky, (mine has had more than one pint of beer spilled over it) or the contact heads inside need a careful brush?

Or change the mouse settings through your MS control panel? Or is there an Options link in the game itself?

I'm no expert, just some thoughts....

LS

What CPU are you using? I had a P4 2.4 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM. It would take around a minute or two to load into the game and then 3 or 4 to load into a mission.

I have upgraded to a Pentium D (dual core) 3.0 Ghz with 1 Gig of Ram and now it just takes a 2o seconds or so to get into a game and around 30 into a mission.

Without the long load times of the old computer, my wife probably would not have been ok with the upgrade. She saw me sitting every night waiting (and waiting) for it to load and it was her who brought up a new computer. :rock:

Post your system specs please anytime you have issues like this.

Also do you make sure you have all your background programs shut down? Including screen savers. Sounds like your memory is being hogged up a bit. But the possiblities of other things are very possible...Even sound card drivers can cause sluggish play.
Post those specs as well as other games that play fine if you have any....all this helps to diagnose.

What are you complaining about? You're loading about a zillion square miles of ocean in 1.5 minutes!

I've got a 2.4 Ghz P4 processor and 1.5 GB of PC3200 RAM. What bothers me is that when I start up the Task Manager before I run the game, I can come back to it later and see that the game was using 700 MB of my page file instead of using my memory. Why would the computer want to waste time filling up 700 MB worth of the page file when I have 1.5 GB of memory? It's a giant waste of time. I would have 700 MB of free memory just sitting there doing nothing, while the computer kept shoving stuff in the page file. Why have the memory if the computer is not going to use it, and rely on the super slow page file instead? I'm a computer science guy, so I understand the problem, I just don't know why Windows insists on using the page file before using my memory, and I don't know how to change it. If it used memory before the page file, I'm sure loading times would be helped considerably.

About the mouse, no it's an optical mouse and it works fine until I get in the game. Then it moves sort of sluggishly for some reason, like maybe I need to adjust the sensitivity, but I can't find that option.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I have an AMD XP 64 processor with a gig of RAM and the game takes a couple of minutes to load on my comp as well......
Maybe you could alter the mouse sensitivity or speed settings in Windows itself?

Try upgrading your graphics card drivers, that might fix the mouse thing.

I wouldn't worry about the memory usage. Windows' virtual memory manager is very smart. If it's putting things in swap there's probably a good reason.

Like I said before...
Also do you make sure you have all your background programs shut down? Including screen savers. Sounds like your memory is being hogged up a bit. But the possiblities of other things are very possible...Even sound card drivers can cause sluggish play.

Your memory will be alocated first...then windows makes the page files and yes it is slower than memory. Make sure you do a ctrl alt delete and see how many processes you have running. Sounds like to me that you have numerous things going.

No, I run a clean machine. No anti virus, no third party firewall, my system tray is completely empty. My process list includes nothing but required system processes. When I Alt-Tab out of the game and check the task manager, My page file is huge while I still have massive amounts of free memory. Which means that Windows is sticking stuff in the page file while I still have a ton of memory available. This confuses me.

More memory does not always translate to faster loading times - it still has to read and load about 700MB from your hard drive - that's the bottleneck.

As far as using the page file, does your processor support hyperthreading? If so, try turning it off for this game. I don't know if SH3 supports it, and if it doesn't, it can actually be slower, and porbably would use only half the memory.

How would I find out of my processor supported it and how to turn it off?

You would probably know it when you bought it, they like to advertise stuff like hyperthreading. You can go into your BIOS and look there, or you can look at your task manager, under performance, it should show up as two processors if you have it.

In that case I doubt my processor supports it. I built the machine myself with the help of a friend, so I selected the processor and all that and I don't remember seeing anything special about it other than the usual "this is the best processor ever" stuff that you see on any processor. I assume your motherboard would need to support hyperthreading too, and I don't remember seeing anything like that about my board either. So, it looks like I'm gonna buy a new video card. If it doesn't fix my situation, I'm not gonna be happy, but man I need one anyway. My GeForce FX 5200 is getting a little outdated. I'll read some vid card suggestions on this site and do some research, then I'll get out my wallet. Thanks for the help everyone.