Sorry to hear you’re having issues with 0.9.7c. Looking at your DxDiag, your machine looks more than capable and your drivers are recent. I did notice that you have a second “LuminonCore IDDCX” video adapter. Looking into that, I think that’s a USB interface to drive an external monitor (typically an iPad or tablet)? I see some chatter on the internet that various video apps and hardware have had issues with this adapter installed/active. I would try disabling that interface (maybe via Device Manager), rebooting, and seeing if that helps.
It’s kind of a long-shot but it’s the only thing I’m seeing.
As you guessed, that’s a decent little tool that allows connecting and sharing the screen on an iPad. After uninstall and reboot things did NOT make any changes.
I’ll have to make a few replies as I have several screenshots to share this time. To be specific, that screenshot from my last reply shows the same thing I saw before I generated this post.
The game itself was always running, by watching task manager it shows the CPU and GPU was been used at a certain percentage. (See picture here.)
CPU usage had a peak when loading the game, then comes the GPU usage on about 30% when black screen shows up. So yes, I agree on “the game is running” part.