Sim City 4 Perfomance issues

Peanut · #1 Posted **Jan 11, 2008, 10:04 AM**

Its so wierd, i have a good computer to run SC4 but its just laggy for me. its still playable but its annoying as hell.

My computer Specs:
AMD 64 X2 duel- 4200+
2 gigs of ram
ATI radeon 1650 pro.

Now i reformated my harddrive last night hoping to speed things up but its just as slow. The funny thing is i can play Company of Heros just fine. Im thinking about upgrading my video card to a Nvidia 8800 GT, any thoughts or suggestions?

Swede · #2 Posted **Jan 11, 2008, 1:32 PM**

A fully built out large map lags something fierce on my computer too. I've got pretty much the same specs as you (a Dell from late 2006). Which is pretty fun considering the game came out in 2003...

Doady · #3 Posted **Jan 12, 2008, 12:46 AM**

Increase virtual memory to 4096MB. Video card doesn't make any difference. Try software rendering mode to see if will run faster.

vid · #4 Posted **Jan 12, 2008, 12:54 AM**

SimCity4 was fatally flawed from the start. There isn't much you can do about the lag. Especially if you have a dual processor. It really hates those for some reason.

It you have a dual processor, you cannot render regions properly. You have to abort it about six hours in and just hope for the best. (It usually involves cutting off a part of the region, so try to get all cities the same size, at least around the edges. Unless you don't care if it's a perfect quadrangle, in which case do whatever.)

SomeFormOFhuman · #5 Posted **Jan 12, 2008, 1:30 AM**

Hmm... I didn't feel any lag problems running on my laptop on a Core 2 Duo Processor. As smooth as ever and my cities are nothing but filled with skyscrapers, which they say these tend to slow down the game, which I doubt; that fact that I also entirely filled all my regions up with skyscrapers.

Here's my laptop specs:

Core 2 Duo T7200 2Ghz (Overclocked to 2.33GHz)
15.4" high gloss Screen
Hitachi 200GB SATA HDD 7200rpm
Nvidia GeForce Go 7800 GTX
Windows XP 64 bit (Upgraded to 64 bit so that I can utilise all 4gigs of RAM)
4GB DDR2 RAM

P.S, you should do what Doady says about virtual memory, update your graphics card drivers and make sure that you have patched your simcity 4 to the latest patch from the official website, as they have some bug fixes which causes a slow down - especially on my laptop before I updated SC4.

1ajs · #6 Posted **Jan 12, 2008, 3:35 AM**

its bugs in simcity 4... but aww do you have it crashing to the desktop issues also?

vid · #7 Posted **Jan 12, 2008, 4:30 AM**

Everyone has those, Adrian.

Peanut · #8 Posted **Jan 12, 2008, 7:38 AM**

After extensive reading on the issue i found a couple answers to why its slowing down but no anwers as to fixing the problem.

1.I heard the dual Core issue with SC4 has actually made the game slower on systems that should be more than able to handle the game.

2. I have lots of plugins, that also causes slowdowns.

3. Bad Programing from EA

4. Rumor of a ATI graphics engine slowdown.

All in all, i dont think i can bring myself to play SC4. Without the plugins there are not enough options, with the plugins its too slow. I dont really want to spend a cool 300 to get a good Video card just for one game. Perhaps i will look into other city building games ( Not SC: societies).

navyweaxguy · #9 Posted **Jan 12, 2008, 12:09 PM**

My new laptop is dual core and I haven't installed the game yet. You guys aren't making it sound like I'm gonna be able to play now.

Dragonfire · #10 Posted **Jan 12, 2008, 8:06 PM**

The dual core thing really depends. I have a 1.66 GHz Intel dual core processor with 1 gig of RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 graphics card, and without any plugins the game runs very fast (and the two big problems with the game happens on dual core processors and ATI cards).

Anyways, I've heard that if you have a problem with the dual cores, when you start up SimCity press Ctrl+Alt+Del, go into the Task Manager, find SimCity4.exe and right-click it. Click Set Affinity, then uncheck either CPU 0 or CPU 1. It should run fine then. You have to do this every time you start up the game.

Matty · #11 Posted **Jan 12, 2008, 9:00 PM**

Runs perfectly on my dual core. Almost lagless actually...

hp dv6449us laptop

LSyd · #12 Posted **Jan 13, 2008, 5:41 AM**

my desktop used to handle it just fine...but lagged at overdeveloped cities, so i increased the ram to 2 gigs and it works fine. it worked fine on my 2 gb ram laptop.

-

Ayreonaut · #13 Posted **Jan 13, 2008, 10:39 AM**

Maybe you have too much porn filling your HD.

SomeFormOFhuman · #14 Posted **Jan 13, 2008, 2:08 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1ajs

its bugs in simcity 4... but aww do you have it crashing to the desktop issues also?

Hmm no not exactly... My desktop is running on a Quad Processor, 4gig ram, and an 8800 GTS 512mb graphics card. So far I can play most games and render a 3ds max model without problems.

Matty · #15 Posted **Jan 13, 2008, 3:46 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1ajs

its bugs in simcity 4... but aww do you have it crashing to the desktop issues also?

If you're running Vista, you can expect this quite often. I've learned to save intermittently, but I still lose some of my masterpiece additions every now and then.

Spocket · #16 Posted **Jan 21, 2008, 8:06 PM**

Part of the problem might lie with your front side bus on the CPU itself. I myself have decided to replace my CPU and motherboard because of this. I bought a Core 2 Duo but like a lot of the earlier stuff that hits the market for cheap , there are drawbacks. I have the 8800 video card (GT) and I know it's more than capable of handling SC4 but the processor FSB is too low. It's basically bottle-necking everything else. I don't know much about your processor but the FSB speed is something to look into at least.

TWAK · #17 Posted **Jan 27, 2008, 9:52 PM**

I hate how my sim city randomly crashes...and I can usually tell. When the game starts to load slowly or I switch and do something to fast (like clicking into landmarks, moving my screen fast then switching to zoning).
For the duel core problem I haven't noticed it, but regardless I use WinLauncher XP. That program manages your affinity settings so you just have to set it once. I have had other games that had problems with duel cores, including Battlefield 2, and KOTOR:2.

MolsonExport · #18 Posted **Jan 28, 2008, 5:51 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by vid

SimCity4 was fatally flawed from the start. There isn't much you can do about the lag. Especially if you have a dual processor. It really hates those for some reason.

It you have a dual processor, you cannot render regions properly. You have to abort it about six hours in and just hope for the best. (It usually involves cutting off a part of the region, so try to get all cities the same size, at least around the edges. Unless you don't care if it's a perfect quadrangle, in which case do whatever.)

Yeah, I've experienced this. Got so frustrated, that I stopped playing altogether.

The Jabroni · #19 Posted **Feb 1, 2008, 11:36 PM**

With my new lappy, Sim City 4 works fine. Yes, there has been the "crash-to-desktop" thing a few times, but it's all because I had background programs running. Here are my specs...

Dell Inspiron 1520:

Windows Vista Home Premium
Intel Centrino Duo Core 1.5 GHz processor
1GB RAM
160 GB Hard Drive
nVidia 8400M GS 128 MB

My only shortcoming is my RAM, in which I should have invested to 2 GB.