Better video card, lesser speed

[Tommo 0]

Hi, I bought a new video card to replace my old nvidia fx 5700. The new card is a X800 pro/gto with 256 mb of ram by ATI... the problem now is that the performance with simcity4 deluxe is now very poor, because it's slow at loading buildings when scrolling the view, more than the old one ... I found that setting the render on "software" makes the game faster... but i don't want to use my CPU to render graphics that my GPU should handle at 1600*1200! I have ati catalyst 6.7 and dx9.0c so this can't be a driver issue. Anyone knows how i can solve this problem? Thanks in advance.

[Arrow 0]

It's an issue with SC4 and ATi graphics cards. Maxis originally had the game programmed to hide certain things while scrolling (trees for example) to keep framerates up but the patch and RH overwrote that.

[prince_of_sims 0]

Go to your Catalyst Control Center/Panel and turn all advanced features of the card on Application Selected.

Usually, Catalyst drivers 5.4 and below give the best performance with SC4. It's also been noted that the Omega Drivers yield better performance than the normal ATI drivers. The Omega Drivers can be found at http://www.omegadrivers.net

You can edit your GraphicsRules.sgr to force the game to hide the buildings when scrolling. This should speed up scrolling a bit.

I own an X700, and I personally find that the last tip helps me the most. I use ATI Tray Tools to create a custom DirectX profile for SC4 so that I don't have to change the settings everytime I want to play another game. If you want ATI Tray Tools (I recommend it, it's very powerful and useful), google for it. You should get some results. ATI Tray Tools comes bundled with the Omega Drivers, so if you download those, you don't need to download the ATI Tray Tools.

EDIT:

Arrow, make sure your information is correct. The "backbuffer" that is required to cache the buildings while scrolling wasn't present in the early generation ATI cards. It was present in nVidia cards of the time. So SC4 had the option, but disabled it for ATI cards. But this meant that the newer ATI cards that supported this feature couldn't take advantage of it. One of the Maxis patches fixed it, but it still slows down the scrolling rate. The backbuffer support on an ATI was never quite up to par with the backbuffer support on an nVidia.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Actually, I have heard that Catalyst up to 6.1 should work fine. And with SC4, having drivers that are many years younger than the game can be an issue, as you see.

For SC4, you don't need a fast gfx card anyway. I play on a GF4 Ti 4200, and it's certainly not the bottleneck.

[prince_of_sims 0]

You're right, T Wrecks. The Catalyst drivers from 5.4 to 6.1 work the best. 5.4 was the lower limit, I think.

[Tommo 0]

Thanks for the replies... I found graphics rules.sgr but i haven't an idea on what to mod... insistead i found Video Cards.sgr and i added the code of my card:, maybe it can be useful... at least now the game knows my card. I had already downloaded the Omegadrivers, but i reinstalled catalyst because omega is always 1-2 version late on the official release. Can you tell me what you changed in the graphic options and in the Directx profile? Thanks.

[prince_of_sims 0]

The Omega Drivers are not the latest, but they still work. Unless you absolutely need the extra optimizations in the newest Catalyst, you will be better off with the Omega Drivers. AFAIK, not a single Catalyst version has offered optimizations on the SC4 series.

I will look at my GraphicsRules.sgr and let you know what I changed.

I can't remember offhand how to change options in the ATI CC, so you might be better off either reading the readme or searching on google.

[Tommo 0]

I downloaded ati tray tools, that is really useful, but i don't know what to change to optimize SC4...

[prince_of_sims 0]

Create a Game Profile for SC4. Now create a Direct3D scheme where EVERYTHING is on Application Selected/Preference.

That's it!