If you are trying to play Stronghold 3 on a laptop with ability to switch between default Intel graphics card and your external graphics card, you will get this error.

To resolve this on some machines:

Open Device Manager.

Expand Display Adapters. Disable (Lower End) Intel Display Adapter.

To solve this problem for PCs with NVidia based cards.

Right click in Windows, select NVIDIA Control Panel and Set Stronghold 3 to always use the "High-Performance NVIDIA processor". Otherwise, you can put the game into a Window which may allow the game to run. To do this edit the config.xml file.

This is located in your Steam folder the default location for this is: C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\stronghold3\bin\config.xml (or have a x64 OS) At the end of the resolution put "windowed=1" So for example my one looks like this - <resolution width=1024 height=768 windowed=1/>

This workaround DOES NOT WORK.

I have an HP pavilion dv7 quad edition.

Device manager shows:
- Intel(R) HD Graphics Family
- Radeon(TM) HD 6770M

If I disable the Intel chipset, my screen goes blank and I have to reboot the machine - which will then only boot in 800x600 resolution.
The Radeon driver depends on the Intel driver to support the builtin screen, so it's usless disabling the Intel adapter.

And disabling the Radeon adapter won't work, because it's the GPU that supports the full DirectX functionality.

So this workaround does not fix the problem.

I also have an HP Pavilion dv7.

I was able to get the game to load by switching to the Intel Graphics instead of the ATI Radeon chip. This allowed the game to load and play. I had to tune down the graphics quite a bit to be able to get it to actually play though.

Looking forward to seeing it run with the high performance graphics on my laptop.

By disabling in the device manager? Or just switching to the "lower power graphics" mode? Is your chipset a 6770M? There are a lot of different models of dv7.

Disabling the device manager just plain broke my machine.

Disabling by using the HP tool to switch to lower power mode almost worked, but was so slow there was no point.

I actually just got a steam refund, had enough of trying various workarounds and not being able to play over a week. But I guess I'll check back in 6 months or so and maybe repurchase if they provide a real fix.

I also have the same problem . I have an hp Pavilion dv7 6150 and when i try to disable the intel card its go black screen. I am very disampointed from the company because i m a huge fun of strongold series and i think they tricked us. Plese find a solution to our problem.