Just bought and installed this game.
Running Win7 64x, and the game in Software mode. (It crashes at the intro if I run it in Hardware mode) Game is running as Administrator and in Win95 compatibility mode. Game works perfectly fine, everything displays (mostly) correctly, I have so far had zero crashes, and the framerate is fine.

The mouse-pointer however, has a severe stuttering issue, both ingame and in the menus. It occasionally works just fine, but it almost always staggers severely, making the necessary micromanagement impossible to do in order to beat the harder levels.

Does anyone else experience this problem, and if so, is there any fix for it?

After downloading new ati dll, the game runs fine in hardware mode.

But.. mouse acts funny, and from time to time it lock up in scrolling (on the edge of the screen)
and game keeps scrooling forever. Nothing helps, except for hard reboot.

Anyone else with this issue?

Win7, 64bits.

Has a solution been found for this?

Not that I know off, I still have the same problem, haven't been able to find anything that helps. Dropped trying to play the game because of it, just gets too unplayable on the harder levels. :(

I was in contact with GoG support prior to their holiday vacation in December trying to resolve the issues I had with a bunch of GoG games.

None of them were resolved and in fact I resolved some of the problems myself instead!

Contact broke after that; was never e-mailed back and never really cared to throw a reminder because I felt that things would never be resolved until their engineers work on the titles more; which has rarely happened in present time.

I have a thread up here: http://www.gog.com/forum/populous_series/populous_3_choppy_sound_graphical_issues_generally_unplayble

Have not tried to go back to troubleshooting it yet.. still have a strong feeling it'll start working properly if I can run the game windowed.

Go the www.popre.net they have many patches available

I believe I've found a solution to the stuttering mouse, which has annoyed me a lot up until this point.
The funny thing is, the solution doesn't seem like it 'should' do anything; but it works for me, so maybe it will for you too.

It's simple:
Locate the GOG folder containing the Populous The Beginning Folder. (Mine is Program Files x86/GOG.com)
Right-click > Copy your Populous 3 folder
Right-click > Paste it in the same GOG.com folder
You will now have a Populous 3 and a Populous 3 - Copy folder.
Go into the Populous 3 - Copy folder, Rightclick GOGSetup.exe and create shortcut to desktop.
Launch game from that.

It seems so stupid, but it's working for me. And any time I try to launch from the old folder the problem is back.
So for whatever reason, it works.

Vince

Had the exact same problem... vince0018's weird solution worked for me as well, though.

This worked

Wow, this really completely removed it. I hope the rest of the game still works, but this is really an easy quick fix, thanks!

Well, I saw a fix was toggling compatibility mode and went to try the game again.. found it was uninstalled for some reason.

Reinstalled it.. crashing on launch, with no obvious reason as to why and none of the 'crash on launch' threads are any help.

I'm not even going to bother troubleshooting this; wasted enough time trying to get the game playable a year ago.

Edit: I ran the software version just to check, and it does work fine, along with the compatibility thing fixing the mouse, but the framerate seems a bit off, and I think there's some tearing. I was previously running the hardware version (and recorded videos), but now I can't anymore. Really wish I didn't uninstall the game in hopes GoG updated it in future.. ugh.

Hell, for all I know it could be because I upgraded to a 780 and NVIDIA deprecated yet more old technology on the hardware side, which wouldn't actually surprise me. Shame I'm in no position to have multiple PCs to run older titles.

I didn't think it would work, but it worked like magic! Thanks a lot for the help! It would have been great if every problematic game could be repaired in such a simple manner.

This worked for me as well, I am running it on Windows 8.1.

Worked also here. Using Windows 8.1 64bit