[Luno]

Particles are what make up bow-waves and smoke. The more there are in a scene, the harder your graphics card has to work to render them.

Lowering the particle density will help somewhat.

The biggest frame-rate killer in SH3 is the extreme level of polygons and lack of optimization for that. Most games like Il-2 have LOD (level-of-detail) models with fewer polygons the further away that object is, until it's finally just a single-pixel dot. In SH3, this is not the case at all. This is especially problematic in ports which have buildings that are just too detailed for their distance.

The point is, GWX adds lots of objects (and therefore, polygons) to harbors, and I think it also adds objects with finer detail (again, more polygons).

Your OS is the not the problem usually. SHIII should run fine on Vista. The problem is your hardware. An integrated laptop graphics chip-set isn't going to cut it; you need a dedicated card, and a decent one at that.

However, you can probably boost performance a bit by cleaning up things that sap memory like browser history, running a periodic hard drive defragmentation to shorten load times, and even simply cleaning dust out of the fan. This last one had a huge effect on my laptop: I pulled out a 1/2 cm thick pad of compressed dust...crashes stopped and frame-rates improved dramatically.

But, I still can't run GWX. I bought a computer for my mom which runs it beautifully, but she only uses it to play facebook games, lol. I owe myself a new system I think.