Does anyone's computer actually run SC4 well?

[zzsim 3]

After recently upgrading my computer:

Old:                                                 New:

512mb DDR ram                         2gb DDR2 ram

2.4ghz P4 processor                  3.2ghz P4 HT processor

Nvidea 6200 video card             Nvidea 8800gts video card

                                                        (New motherboard and various other components)

I've noticed one thing, SC4 it seems is not very PC friendly.  While I can run almost every new game (FEAR, STALKER etc...) with full settings at 1280 x 1024 resolution, SC4 still lags considerable in game (especially when growing trees and enabling automata), with the only performance increase occuring with the greatly reduced load times.  Now I have a pretty large plugins folder (around 1.5gb), but so do many other avid SC4 users who continue to play this game.  Consequently my question is, does anyone else who has a comparable sized plugins folder run the game smoothly, and if so what kind of computer are you running it on?  It seems that you can throw the newest computer parts at this game, with no improvements in ingame performance (I actually think my old 6200 ran the game better).

Note:  I'm also planning to upgrade to a Core 2 Duo processor after the rumored price drop this July, but as SC4 dosen't utilize duel core technology, I have a feeling this will won't have any positive effects on performance.

[DOXXP29 5]

It seems SC4 actually runs better on older computers since it is an older game. My comp, a 2.0gig Gateway with 769mb RAMBUS runs SC4 fine. It is also of note that my computer, which was top of the line when I bought it, came on the market around the same time that SC4 came out. (In fact, I was kicking myself for not waiting a few months and getting a 2.4 gig like yours, which was the next top end machine to come out.)

But yeah, zzsim, some computers run SC4 better than others. The new dual core seem to have problems and most people set them to run with one core only. You might want to consider adding a bit more RAM to your older machine and it may very well be the best computer on which to play SC4.

[BIWDC 2,296]

sc4 runs pretty well on my pc but it does lag a little with large cities when
i move the camera around i think a lot of people have that problem.

heres my pc specs:

processor(2)
amd athlon 64 x2  2.2 ghz(there dual cores)

ram:
1 GB DDR

video card:
Ati Radeon x1650 pro(512MB DDR2)

it does run slighty better on this pc then it did on my old one
which had less of everything,my plugins folder has only
210mb in it.

[WJ_Webhog 12]

Hi there,

I also have a dual core and actually wonder how you can set the game to run on only one core so that I can test what I've heard here and there.

Cheers,

[zoidberg1986 0]

simcity only runs on 1 core

even if you have a dual/quad core pc , simcity will still run only on one core.

i have a Athlon64 x2 3800 + 2gb ram + geforce 8800gts. and yes it still lags with rendering hueg city's.

still, its a lot better compared to my older athlon64 3000

[DanWalker8 3]

My computer can handle the medium cities with some slowness occuring when they fill the map. I play on a 1.8ghz single processor Mac G5 with 768mb ram at 1680x1050 resolution. A large tile with a city exceding 250,000, forget about it! So, No my computer doesn't do well as far as i'm concerned but i put up with it

[CasperVg 372]

My simcity always starts to lag when I zoned new residential/industrial/commercial, but I guess that's a RAM problem since it has to calculate all the new things it could do with the new zonage (is this correct?)

[Xyloxadoria 1,099]

My computer is slow and lags most of the time. When ever i click a menu like the road menu or the power menu, it takes about a minnute before it opens and i can use the menu objects.  (It lagged loading this page)

[elle_driver 2]

For how many BAT's I use, my PC copes quite well with it but it's by no means fast. I just have to be patient and give it five minutes to recover after I've been playing before I even bother trying opening Internet Explorer and anything else!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

My beat up old machine runs the game just fine.  An Athlon 2400+ (2GHz) 32-bit box with integrated graphics (GEForce 4MX) 128MB on 1GB RAM, 4096MB Paging file, AC97 sound board, LCD 19" display by ACER.

I do have slowdown problems when the population gets upwards of 500,000.  Since I don't care about this, it suits me.

If I were going to upgrade, the current hardware solution would definitely include an Intel Core 2 Duo.  This baby seems to run as a single processor with very slick pipelining.

Since this would need a 64-but O/S, I would choose Vista Ultimate since I have XP Pro now.

[autoVino 26]

My computer is similar to N_O_Body's and the game runs pretty much smooth all the way through.  The only exception is when making lots of trees with the tree tool... but there it's only a little lag with the graphics, which may be my video card.

[High5flyier 7]

Back in August of 04 I bought a Dell 8400 Series Pentium4 Processor (3.0GHz). I have upgraded my ram to 2gb. This last upgrade from 1gb to 2gb was a diffenit improvement. Video card: ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256 mb gddr3. I have just 26 processes running. I would have to say after looking at what everybody around the world has to play simcity on that this is one well functioning machine. I had a problem back in Janruary when somehow my video driver got upgraded. This really droped simcity performence. After I retuned to the 5.8 Ati driver everything was happy again. My long term plans are to start picking up key replacement parts so that I can still play 10 years from now. Load up time with the data packer system is fast (1gb of plugins),Clicking on any menue is just 1sec.I defrag dayly and also run registry mechanic dayly. There is no more desktop crashes except for puzzle piece work. I feel very lucky!

[MonkeyMan09 2]

wow you guess have them fancy video cards and everything and the game lags... I have a Gateway Laptop and it runs excellent.. I created a with the greyscale, region that was like 36x36(config) and it loaded it about 30 minutes.. and my computer specs..

Intel Core Dou 1.83 Ghz

1 gig Ram

100 Gb Harddrive

Ati Redoen x1400 Video Card

Btw that game only lags a bit when I have my battery life to balanced but when in high performance it does not lag..

[waway625 72]

my specs

Core 2 Duo e6300 overclocked to 2.8Ghz

2048mb Micron D9s running at 800Mhz 4-4-4-12 timings

320mb 8800GTS

my plugins are about 2Gb in size and yes my PC runs it ok (not as fast as i want to, but yes, on my largest city of about 1 million, the lslowdowns are minimal compared to my old Athlon64 3800+ and my old AthlonXP2600+

Originally posted by: zzsim After recently upgrading my computer:

Old:                                                 New:

512mb DDR ram                         2gb DDR2 ram

2.4ghz P4 processor                  3.2ghz P4 HT processor

Nvidea 6200 video card             Nvidea 8800gts video card

                                                        (New motherboard and various other components)

I've noticed one thing, SC4 it seems is not very PC friendly.  While I can run almost every new game (FEAR, STALKER etc...) with full settings at 1280 x 1024 resolution, SC4 still lags considerable in game (especially when growing trees and enabling automata), with the only performance increase occuring with the greatly reduced load times.  Now I have a pretty large plugins folder (around 1.5gb), but so do many other avid SC4 users who continue to play this game.  Consequently my question is, does anyone else who has a comparable sized plugins folder run the game smoothly, and if so what kind of computer are you running it on?  It seems that you can throw the newest computer parts at this game, with no improvements in ingame performance (I actually think my old 6200 ran the game better).

Note:  I'm also planning to upgrade to a Core 2 Duo processor after the rumored price drop this July, but as SC4 dosen't utilize duel core technology, I have a feeling this will won't have any positive effects on performance.

quote>

you should know that P4s (no matter how high the clocks are) arent good for gaming  especially on CPU heavy games like Sim City

the 8800GTS wont be doing much work (as its an old game) and proof is, i did not notice much performance increase (if any) going from a 7600GT to my 8800GTS, though the performance difference going from an A64 3800+ to a C2D oced to 2.8Ghz was dramatic

as far as SC4 not utlilizing dual core technology, i think you should look at this...

this is during playing my largest city (about a million population with about 2gb of plugins) and the CPU load (though not 100% on both cores)  is about typical for any game (in fact STALKER uses the core more poorly than SC4)

[jabezscratch 159]

I have a Core 2 Duo 2.4, 4G RAM, WD Raptor 10,000RPM HDD, ATI 1900GT + 1.4 Gigs of Plugins. The game runs reasonably well except for my capital city which has a population of 2,000,000 and tons of ploppable landmarks -- on that city, I basically play it in pause mode then I scroll off the map on to the background and run it at top speed when I'm ready for it to grow then pause again and go back to building on the map (LOL -- seriously, I have to do this or else it's too slow running it while viewing the actual map!).

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

I have a year-and-a-half old Toshiba Satellite A105 (1g RAM, 1.73GHz Pentium M). I know laptops are not generally the best gaming hardware, but I have need for easy mobility, and this is much more suited for that. The biggest problem I have in the game is in U-Drive-It mode, certain buildings and bridges stay pixellated. Mostly the game works great though. I may be a bit too tolerant of certain shortcomings, however. Perhaps I will address that when I purchase my next laptop.

[zzsim 3]

Wow, I completely forgot that I made this thread !  Thanks everyone for the responses, from what I've gathered it seems like most people still experience some kind of performance issues even with more modern hardware.

waway625, thanks for the great info, I'm glad to hear that there's performance gains from upgrading to a Core 2 Duo as I will be buying one sometime next month after the price drop.  How big of a performance increase did you get in other games besides SC4?  The reason I actually upgraded my computer is to play the game on your wallpaper !  I'm hoping a nice Core 2 Duo and an 8800 will run it well.

BTW, you might want to edit out that EA logo from that screenshot, we don't like them in these parts ! (< SCSocieties reference incase you didn't get that ). 

[Cleaner475 150]

mine doers but I have had my computer for half as long as I have had the game, I have quite a bit of lag on the biggest city tiles but I;ve got used to it.

But I have 2 gigs of plugins which Lag it loads.

[IDS2 3,344]

Mine works like a charm. Just a bit slow.

[Kazeneko 0]

Obviously I don't post here much, but this thread caught my attention on the main page.

I purchased my gaming desktop way back in Oct of 2002, top of the line Falcon-NW, and haven't upgraded it since, so I had to see how well SC4 would run on newer hardware. I recently got an Acer Aspire 5610 laptop for business use, and just had to try SC4 on (yeah, I know, business computer.. not for games.. hehehe). When I first installed and started up the game with about 1.5GBs worth of plug-ins, the game would load fine, then crash to desktop after a few minutes of running horridly slow. After doing a lot of searching around the net, I found that a combination of Vista, and the Intel graphics chip in the laptop made for a bad combination for SC4. The only solution? Run the game in, first, XP compatibility mode (duh on my part), and then use software rather than hardware rendering, still with all settings for the game maxed out. It's amazing the difference it made with performance! My largest city has a population of ~1million, and it actually runs too fast, and the days fly by.

[waway625 72]

Originally posted by: zzsim

Wow, I completely forgot that I made this thread !  Thanks everyone for the responses, from what I've gathered it seems like most people still experience some kind of performance issues even with more modern hardware.

waway625, thanks for the great info, I'm glad to hear that there's performance gains from upgrading to a Core 2 Duo as I will be buying one sometime next month after the price drop.  How big of a performance increase did you get in other games besides SC4?  The reason I actually upgraded my computer is to play the game on your wallpaper !  I'm hoping a nice Core 2 Duo and an 8800 will run it well.

BTW, you might want to edit out that EA logo from that screenshot, we don't like them in these parts ! (< SCSocieties reference incase you didn't get that ). 

quote>

no probs

improvements? hmmm A LOT! you see, your 8800GTS is held back by the P4 (even in modern games) its like putting an F1 engine in a Honda Civic (you get my dirft?)

the P4s get trampled by the A64, so comparing a P4 and a C2D is well..hehe i cant but to give you a comparison, even a 3.6Ghz Dual COre pentium is outperformed by the low clocked e4300 (@ 1.8Ghz)

the P4 (especially at just 3.2Ghz) just cannot keep up with the 8800GTS and a Core2Duo will greatly help..

and if you get the Core2Duo, make sure to get it to at least 2.66 or 3Ghz (so that means an overclocking mobo too..something in the lines of the P965/p975 and 650/680i or newer chipsets)..

good luck with the purchase bro

oh and regarding that EA logo, yeah im not a big fan of EA but theyre the publisher for that game on the pic (Crysis)

[scififan68 23]

                                         My old specs: 
                         Compaq Presario S3002 
Windows Xp Home Edition, AMD 2000+ 1.67GHz, 512MB RAM, 60GB hard drive,32MB S3 ProSavage DDR. Oh boy Sc4 lagges so badly, but rarely crashes.


                                      New specs:   
                                      Dell Xps 410
 Windows Vista™ Home Premium,Intel Duo core e6300 1.86GHz, 2GB ram, 250GB hard drive, 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7300 LE.
Sc4 works great now, but crashes, when I don't set the Affinty.

[zzsim 3]

Thanks waway625, so I'm guessing that what I've been hearing about the P4s (especially single cores) bottlenecking 8800s is true. That makes me even more excited to eventually upgrade, since my performance in many games has been pretty good so far, and it sounds like a Core 2 Duo will make it even better. Currently I can run FEAR, HL2 and STALKER at max settings at 1024 X 1280 resolution with an average of 50-60 FPS in FEAR/HL2 and 30-40 FPS in STALKER (though it dips into the low 20s in some of the more open areas).

Also, I'm definetly picking up a higher clock Core 2 Duo. The price drop on July 22 is supposed to take the e6850 (I think that's the model number, not sure) down to $266 with a clock speed of 3.093ghz right out of the box. Compared to the current Core 2 Extremes wich are clocked at 2.93ghz and around $500, this seems like a great deal. They're also cutting the Quad Core 2.4ghz down to $266, but as little software/games will even be able to use that for another 2 years or so, it dosen't seem worth it. Plus, in the current benchmarks, the Quad Core still lags slightly behind the high end Core 2 Duos in performance since its basically 2 Core 2 Duos slapped together in a similar fashion as to how the original Dual Core P4s were just 2 single cores connected through the front side bus. I'll be waiting for the true native quad cores with the same architecture (in terms of core interaction and connectivity) as the Core 2 Duos. Anyways thanks again!

[DJGspinNhitz 7]

I have a Dell that is 6 years old. 2.6 Intel, 728RAM, 380 Gig HD, Nvidea 64mb Gforce. I have 3.5gigs of plug ins (more if I load everything I have downloaded), it takes 15 minutes to load using the SUM. I can only build while paused or it goes so slow it will drive me nuts. Takes about 2 minute to open menu items. Cities run find up to around 200,000 then really choppy. You Drive It is out of the question locks up everytime. Over all the play isn't bad but I am going to buy a new computer soon and it has to have at least 2 gig RAM or more and a 256 graphics card. The Nvidea cards seem to handle SC4 better, my laptop had a ATI and it was way slower with more RAM and similar everything else. Going to try out the dat packer thing this coming week to see if it speeds things up. BTW I play large regions too which doesn't help. I know if I want to play SC4 the way I want to I need to be patient.

GQ

[Albatross Domain 2]

I think it's not really going to matter what kind of hardware you have on your system, whether like mine:  Dell Dimension 2300, 1.69Ghz- 366Mhz FSB, 512MB Ram, 80Gig HD, and running on Windows XP Home Edition SP2, and still have all of the original hardware it came with it.. except for the updated drivers.

I'm not saying my comp. will fly  by, by anymeans. If SC4 was the only thing that was running (with most of the non essential processes turned off) it'll do just fine... however XP and Vista are not all that friendly when they are turned off... Vista especially.

If you are a guru at modifying XP or Vista congrats, but as for the rest of us... as my drill sgt, once told us: "Suck it up and Drive on, and deal with it..."

[hawkpride147 1]

i've got a gateway laptop with an AMD Athlon Mobile 64 3500+ processor running Windows XP Home SP2, 1GB RAM, 80GB Internal HDD, 250GB External HDD, current drivers, and V-RAM set to 4096MB (4GB). my game runs well. i also have a 1.5GB plugin folder. i always use task manager to end any unnecessary processes before i start the game. if you're unsure of what is necessary and what isnt, google the process name and you can find out.

[waway625 72]

Originally posted by: zzsim Thanks waway625, so I'm guessing that what I've been hearing about the P4s (especially single cores) bottlenecking 8800s is true. That makes me even more excited to eventually upgrade, since my performance in many games has been pretty good so far, and it sounds like a Core 2 Duo will make it even better. Currently I can run FEAR, HL2 and STALKER at max settings at 1024 X 1280 resolution with an average of 50-60 FPS in FEAR/HL2 and 30-40 FPS in STALKER (though it dips into the low 20s in some of the more open areas).

Also, I'm definetly picking up a higher clock Core 2 Duo. The price drop on July 22 is supposed to take the e6850 (I think that's the model number, not sure) down to $266 with a clock speed of 3.093ghz right out of the box. Compared to the current Core 2 Extremes wich are clocked at 2.93ghz and around $500, this seems like a great deal. They're also cutting the Quad Core 2.4ghz down to $266, but as little software/games will even be able to use that for another 2 years or so, it dosen't seem worth it. Plus, in the current benchmarks, the Quad Core still lags slightly behind the high end Core 2 Duos in performance since its basically 2 Core 2 Duos slapped together in a similar fashion as to how the original Dual Core P4s were just 2 single cores connected through the front side bus. I'll be waiting for the true native quad cores with the same architecture (in terms of core interaction and connectivity) as the Core 2 Duos. Anyways thanks again!quote>

at just 50-60fps in FEAR and HL2; theres definitely a bottleneck with the 8800GTS as i get 100+ on both some games need CPU power more than others

id go for a quad though as when games start to utilize dual cores it wont be optimized for dual cores only but for multi cores as well) though the q6600 may sound tempting, its a bit hot though (so a no-no for me considering i overclock much ) i migh get the E6850 soon too

[Cob92 360]

Why does everyone complain about lag so much. My machine has:2GHz Pentium D, 2GB RAM, 256MB ATI Radeon, but I can run a large city filled with skyscrapers from end to end on max graphics settings with absolutely no lag. I think it depends mainly on memory and GFX card. All the dual core people are complaining, and I, with my humble single core have flawless performance.

[Q-Tips 37]

I recently chanced computer from an P4 processor with 1GB RAM to an Intel Core Duo Extreme 2,6 ghz with 4 GB RAM with working speed 1200 mhz. I have about 1,6 GB in my plugin folder. The chances in game speed are amazing. No waiting for anything, no lag, no waiting for game to start. But i havent tried a city with a population more than 400 000.

Before i bought the computer, i compared the RAM with one slow with only 533 MHZ, and how i can see it, the memory speed is of importance for how smoothly Sim City will run.

[waway625 72]

Originally posted by: Cobhris96 Why does everyone complain about lag so much. My machine has:2GHz Pentium D, 2GB RAM, 256MB ATI Radeon, but I can run a large city filled with skyscrapers from end to end on max graphics settings with absolutely no lag. I think it depends mainly on memory and GFX card. All the dual core people are complaining, and I, with my humble single core have flawless performance.quote>

i dont think the graphics card plays that much of a role

i did myupgrade in two parts

first i changed from Athlon64 3800+ and 1Gb of RAM to a Core2duO e6300 and overclocked it from 1.8Ghz to 2.8Ghz and the performance increase was instantly noticeable..

i had my 7600GT then..

then i upgraded from a 7600GT to an 8800GTS and the performance increase (in SC4) wasnt that felt (if any at all)

SC4 is an old game (its not even a DX8 game AFAIK) so i dont think there would be much difference going from a top end card of two years ago and today would help (as two years ago, the 6800ultra was king, which is equivalent to a 7600GT..and going from a 6800ultra level performance to an 8800GTS did not yield much results)

so i think it all boils down to RAM and CPU power

with your setup, how much fps are you getting? and what is the size of your city and plugins?