The most reliable "fix" discovered by the community involves going under the hood of the game's configuration. The game looks for its startup instructions in a file called SeriousSam3.ini : You need to find your local user data. On , this is typically found at: ...\Steam\userdata\[YourID]\41070\local\SeriousSam3.ini The Adjustment
For players with AMD Radeon graphics cards, the solution might be in the driver settings, not the game. One user with an AMD RX-470 reported success by enabling a specific feature in their Radeon driver software [11†L23-L26].
Inside this directory, you will see one or more folders named with a string of numbers (these represent your unique Steam User ID). Click into your user folder.
Serious Sam 3 heavily relies on legacy DirectX API runtimes. If these system runtimes become corrupt, or if you explicitly toggled gfx_strAPI='D3D11' in the developer console without having the exact Microsoft distribution packages installed, the game throws the display mode error.
The most reliable "fix" discovered by the community involves going under the hood of the game's configuration. The game looks for its startup instructions in a file called SeriousSam3.ini : You need to find your local user data. On , this is typically found at: ...\Steam\userdata\[YourID]\41070\local\SeriousSam3.ini The Adjustment
For players with AMD Radeon graphics cards, the solution might be in the driver settings, not the game. One user with an AMD RX-470 reported success by enabling a specific feature in their Radeon driver software [11†L23-L26].
Inside this directory, you will see one or more folders named with a string of numbers (these represent your unique Steam User ID). Click into your user folder.
Serious Sam 3 heavily relies on legacy DirectX API runtimes. If these system runtimes become corrupt, or if you explicitly toggled gfx_strAPI='D3D11' in the developer console without having the exact Microsoft distribution packages installed, the game throws the display mode error.