For what it's worth, I have occasional "slide shows" while playing SH3. I'm running an AMD XP2800, 1.5GB of DDR, and an ATI 9800 Pro AIW card, so I'm falling steadily off the capability end of the scale. Still, most of time, SH3 is quite playable with reasonably smooth frame rates. For awhile I was getting an occasional crash-computer-reboot thing, so I tried the usual memtest diagnostic and the only thing that turned up was an acknowledged anomoly related to AMD processors (according to the memtest forum). I was at a loss as to anything to be done until my daughter mentioned an idea. When frame rates get choppy, I hit the Windows key (same effect as Alt-Tab) to drop SH3 to the task bar. I let it set maybe 5-10 seconds, then click on the SH3/GWX to re-expand it, and it seems to settle out and run smoothly. Since I've been doing this, I haven't had a single crash-to-forced-reboot event. I'd thought about buying a more powerful video card like the XP1950 Pro, but I think I'd be better off waiting until I can do a full system upgrade rather than trying a band aid approach that will leave me bottlenecked by the CPU. Oh, in case you haven't tried it yet, run dxdiag and set the Sound Acceleration slider down to either the lowest (unaccelerated) or the one just above it (Basic acceleration). It's surprising that sound settings can have such a profound effect on video performance, but it's true.
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Spectre
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