System requirements

[cyberskin 0]

I don't know what the problem is but i've had simcity 4 since it came out ( 2003 ) and ever since, the game gets really slow when the city gets about 50+ % complete. Here are the system requirements :

Minimum System Requirements

Operating System: Windows XP/ME/2000/98 (Windows 95/NT not supported)

CPU: 500 MHz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor

RAM: 128 MB

CD/DVD-Rom Speed: 8X

Hard Drive Space: 1 gig plus space for saved games

Video: 16 MB video card, DirectX 7 compatible

Sound: DirectX 7.0 compatible

Input: Keyboard, mouse

Recommended System Requirements

CPU: 1 GHz or faster

RAM: 256 MB or more

Video: 32 MB or greater supported Direct 3D video card

i got a P4 2.4

geforce 4800 (128mb)

512 mb memory.

now that is alot more then the recommended requirements and still the game gets really choppy when playing, and swithching back and forth from regions sucks!!..

anyways i wanted to know what everyone else is running for pc's to get the game to run smooth when the board fills up. I imagine it must take a good pc now a days to get it to run smooth. ?

so what where they thinking in 2003 when i came out, the game was 3 years advance in graphics for computers at that time.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, you have enough machine to run a smaller city.  The problem is that, like all marketing blurbs, the box tells you what it takes to open the game and maybe run the tutorials.  Let's see if i can shed a little light on the real requirements:

1. XP RAM needs 128 to 256MB depending on the version you have.  It also needs a lot of swap space.
2. The game needs about 300MB for a large, populated title with no plugins.
3. Plugins are memory resident.  All plugins are loaded into memory when the game starts.  However only database data is retained.  Only .sc4lot, .sc4desc, .sc4model, .dat, and .dll files are really loaded.  Others are bypassed (but looked at).  If you have a lot of plugins, you will be paging them in your mameory.
4. When I started playing, I had 512MB.  I raised my memory to 768MB and got a quantum leap in game performance.  I then put my Virtual Memory up to maximum (4GB) which allows a lot of non-essential O/S stuff to swap out and stay out.
5. Then I upped my memory (RAM) to 1GB, which is the max for my machine.  There was a significant increase again.  I think in this case, the paging rate was reduced to nearly zero.
6. The application itself is CPU bound.  It will run your processor at 100% if you have much in your city.  This is going to result in a slowdown of the simulation as there get to be more an more objects to evaluate on each pass.  The bigger the city, the slower things are going to go.  The only cure for this is a faster CPU.  The application cannot use dual cores.  Fancy graphics cards don't help.  In fact, modern graphics cards may fail because the application doesn't understand them.
7. Optimally, to run a big city with some plugins you need 2GB, 4GB virtual, and a 4GHz CPU.  This is a good application for melting laptops.