Greetings.

Decided to replay this game once more, however, after playing it for several minutes (3 - 10, each time is different), Sacred Gold seemingly freezes. What is weird to me, is that the game continues to work - sounds can be heard and hotkeys (inventory, save menu and etc.) are seemingly working. Alt-tabbing to the system and then back to the game gives a black screen.

What I tried:
- launch the game in a compatibility mode with other Windows systems. It just prolonged inevitable for some time.
- installed 2 separate HD modes. The results are the same.
- switched several settings back and forward in all configs.
- window mode doesn't help either/

Can anyone suggest a solution?

My PC config if that matters:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-12400 2.50 GHz 12th Gen)
16 GB RAM
intel UHD Graphics 730
Windows 11 Pro

There are a few things that come to mind in regards to the problem. If you don't have the latest Community Patch insalled, I'd get that first. Probably the easiest is to check your Event Viewer log to see if there are errors in regards to Sacred 2. This may point to a specific problem. Your mention on black screen could possibly be video drivers, but it may be that the game won't work properly in mulltiprocessor mode. You change processor affinity to 0 for Sacred.EXE to see if the crashes still occur(use the Details tab on the Task Manager). If none of my previous suggestions work, a forum and Google search may point to a solution.

If I was playing Sacred 2, that's the first thing to do, however I've troubles with first Sacred =( Unfortunately, changing the processor affinity just prolonged the inevitable, but it's a step to a right direction I guess? Before starting this topic, I had been googling solution and looks like I'm the first with this kind of problem -_-
Thanks for the answer anyway!

I'm glad it worked. :) It's a very useful tool and I use it for a couple of games. Sacred was completely unplayable on my potato-laptop without it (the game engine is very poorly written and unoptimised). With dgVoodoo it is choppy sometimes, when it gets busy on the screen, but otherwise it runs fine. Without dgVoodoo it was just a slideshow.

Welp, after working just fine several days, the same problem occured today, even with dgVoodoo.
Don't know what to think now t_t

Considering you're on Win11, it's probably some system updating shenanigans. Did that so-called OS decide for you that it needs to change something recently? Graphics drivers maybe? Sacred is very finicky with GPU drivers.

Is that your only GPU? I think it uses D3D9On12 then, as explained here:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000091239/graphics.html
D3D9On12 is still quite buggy with older games in my experience. dgVoodoo 2 should work around that issue however, since it doesn't use either the DX9 driver or D3D9On12, it directly translates to DX11 or DX12. It's worth trying both settings.

Alternatively, you can also try DDrawCompat, which added some experimental support for D3D9On12 in the latest v0.4.0 release:
https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/releases

I tested it very briefly now and it seems to work ok with this game even with D3D9On12, although changing some settings via the config overlay (Antialiasing, ResolutionScale) causes a crash or deadlock.

Well, Win 11 did downloaded some updates lately and after that freezes had returned. Tried to update GPU drivers up to no avail, as well as installing DDrawCompat (gave me a new problem instead of old) and then I simply reinstalled the game with dgVoodoo and it seemingly helped. But who knows what may happen next... With DDrawCompat the cursor began to move across the screen very roughly to the point that game became unplayable. Probably should have installed it without dgVoodoo 2 =)