But even a driver update had no effect. My thoughts as well... I don't know what DX settings may have changed, as I'm not generally the sort to monkey around with things like that and would have been highly unlikely to have changed anything in my previous setup (and certainly haven't made any custom changes in this one yet). The curious thing is that before, when my computer only had 4GB of RAM, although things ran like they were coated in molasses they at least ran, and I practically never reach 3GB of RAM usage. Now that I have 16GB of RAM (and the same 64-Bit Windows 7 OS that I had before even when I only had 4GB of RAM), the game seems to say "My, we've got all this extra RAM now, don't mind if I do help myself" and then it overeats and crashes (sounds like me this past Saturday, now that I think about it...). The DirectX 11 ransom note text happened to me when I enabled DirectX 11.