Large Tile Game Performance

[lestatdl1 0]

Just as I got back into playing SC4 again now that I have a spiffy new gaming computer, I'm back where I left the game: frustrated at performance once I have a big city.

My PC Specs:

AMD Athalon 64 3800 (San Diego)

2 GB RAM

nVidia 7800GT 256MB (SLI x16)

Western Digital Raptor 70 GB (@10,000 RPM)

So basically, my graphics card is slightly below top of the line, the main processor is fast but not quite top of the line, I don't recall my motherboard specs but it was the best MSI SLI x16 board available earlier this year, plenty of RAM, and the fastest hard drive they make.

I have NAM installed, as well as a dozen or so other lots, and perfect pathfinding. Graphics settings are set at medium or low, 16-bit color, 1024x768 resolution.

My city has just under 300K sims. I can run at cheetah speed and nothing will happen for a few minutes, until eventually a few days go by. It takes about 20 seconds after laying down a long avenue before I get my cursor back. Development is slow to stagnant because of all the lag, demand is acting quirky, and I get warning messages about funding long after the funding is fixed. It's painfully slow! I wanted a city of 1,000,00-2,000,000, but I'm not even close and it's grinding to a halt.

So...should I give up on large city tiles for dense areas? Maybe stick with medium tiles for my city areas and leave the large tiles for suburbs and farms...is that the only way?

[coolotter88 2]

its probably your processor. you need a supercomputer processor to run SC4 or something.

[dadyrghluv 8]

it could be a result of the NAM and the different plugins associated with it u have installed. u have different options when installing the NAM and some of them are cpu intensive. i have the same CPU as u do and my cities starting to grind to a halt as well. so i think it's the plugins thayt come along with the NAM. u could try uninstalling the NAM and re-installing it choosing less CPU intesive plugins from it. that may do the trick.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Info I googled indicate this is an Athlon FX processor (dual core). 

Well, I shouldn't expect any better performance from this box, than any other equivalent speed CPU.  If you are running XP 64 it is likely to be less performant because that O/S seems to be a "shut up and go away" stop gap for people waiting for Vista. 

One of the problems may be that old bugbear that SC4 doesn't much care for multiple processors.  Try setting the processor affinity to one cpu, and run in Rhino, no Cheetah.