So I have decided to download the entire Gabriel Knight series on here in hopes that was going to solve my problem with GK3.
I have a pretty up-to-date Windows 8 system right now and any time I try to start Gabriel Knight 3, it opens up to the hotel where it starts to play out and then parts of the room turn black and look a little fragmented. And then it just freezes on me.

So I thought this was a graphical issue and installed the DirectX 2010 runtime. That didn't do anything to fix it. I also used compatibility settings exactly for it to make it work (like 640x480 pixels and 16-bit color with Windows XP 2). Nothing seems to work and allow me to play the game. I really don't want to have to return these because of this issue, so I would really appreciate some help on this.

Do you have a different video chip than IntelHD. Intel chips tend to be finicky at best.

If you have NVidia chip be sure to try to use "Manage 3d Settings" in the Nvidia control panel and select NVidia as the preferred graphics processor.

I don't have Windows 8, so I don't know if that is part of the problem or not.

its my new notebook. so no big deal.
on my win7 geforce desktop pc it works just fine.

edit: yes you are right. business notebook.
Intel Pentium B980, 2,4GHz, 4GB RAM ;-)

So I take it its a straight business notebook? No dual chip set?

I hear stories like this though it keeps me from wanting to upgrade to win8!

Win 7 works well enough for me.

I re-downloaded the game and tried it out on my M11x R3, and it worked fine. Not sure if it was defaulting to IntelHD, or the GeForce. But since there was no problem, I didn't check.

This is EXACTLY what happens to me, too! Right after the Chapter 1, Day 1 picture, I get the message, "Windows has stopped working." Then the game completely crashes.

Is there ANY way to fix this at all, or is the game totally dead?

I'm having the same problem. I can view the opening cinematic fine, then the game freezes or crashes every time. I'm on Windows 8 with an Intel i5 chip.

Same issue here, on Intel graphics and Win8 64-bit. Anyone get it running?

Just figured out a solution. Grabbing the latest Intel HD 4000 drivers (dated May 2013) from Intel's site took care of the crash immediately following the Day 1 screen. I did have to turn off incremental rendering to get rid of the flicker. I still have some tearing that switching to software rendering mode seems to get rid of... except then the game doesn't look anywhere near the same quality as it does with hardware rendering. But at least it's playable now.

I tried that and got a message that my graphics driver is custom installed by the manufacturer and Intel cannot update it. :(

I have the same problem. Contacted the support team, who said that this game is not supported for windows 8 (indeed, you can see that windows 8 is not listed as a platform for it in the GK3 page).

I have opened a new forum thread asking for help, reformulating the problem in order to make clearer that our problem is windows 8 and not the game. It is named 'anyone able to run gk3 on windows 8?'.

Lets hope that someone can come up with a solution!

This worked for me! Still very playable. Thanks, Purdue!