I had bought a disk of SH4 just about the moment when it first came out. I loaded it in and had some pretty good frame rates, yet it looked very filtered over, almost hazey/pixellated (not speaking of in-game effects settings) to the point that it felt very "distant" to interact with. So, I had uninstalled SH4 soon after. Back to SH3/GWX3 & loving it all.
Just this past weekend, I had decided to make an adjustment to my system & give SH4 another install and try. Along the way I had heard for a while that ATI cards often suffer from the effects of their own Catalyst Control Center. So, with this potential problem in mind, I went ahead and cleaned out the CCC from my system. Following a registry clean, I re-installed my old SH4, defragged disk, etc. WOW! ~
I am bound for the Pacific fleet!