Intel iMac video card fix for HD 2600

[unityx 1]

Well great, this forum seems to not format stuff right.... I used returns and such to separate the directions, it formated it into one large continuous paragraph..... If ya wanna know, just e-mail me. This fix I did smooths out scrolling A LOT. Its not butter, but playable. Also the number of pixel holes in cars and waves is nearly eliminated! Basically is playable for me again. Although sound issues are still here and there.... unity@mac.com

[bwatterud 7]

For the forum formatting, you need to use HTML coding if you're using Safari (or use Firefox, which formats stuff correctly.)

This fix seems interesting. Do tell more.

[unityx 1]

So I am have been pretty darn ticked about buying a new iMac that has TONS more horsepower than my laptop only to have SC4 RH run like pure crap.

Prior I have a Titanium 1GHz G4 PowerBook with 768MB RAM with Radeon 9000.

Now I have a 24" iMac 2.4GHz Core 2 duo with 2GB RAM and a Radeon HD 2600.

As some may recall the Radeon 9000 had a issue on the PC and Mac where it was not addressed correctly with a certain attribute. This result is REALLY crappy scrolling. I HOPED the new iMac had the same issue, but besides scrolling there were other artifacts in the game. Mainly pixels "holes" in cars and waves were not rendering right all the time. So I poked around and played with the same files that fixed the 9000.

I have the April Universal Binary BETA update from Aspyr Installed.

For iMacs with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 you need to go into the main application folder, then "SimCity 4 Data" folder :
1. Open "Video Cards.sgr" with TextEdit
2. Locate the end of the list of "vendor "ATI" 0x1002"
3. Add this line to the end, but before the word "end" :

card 0x9583 "Radeon HD2600"

4. Save and close.
5. Open "Graphic Rules.sgr"
6. Locate the ATI rules, near the bottom like so:

stringMatch cardIdentity "*7?00*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*8?00*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9000*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9100*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9200*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9300*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9400*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon VE"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon Mobility"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon FireGL"

7. You will add just one line:

stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon HD2600"

8. It should look like this:

stringMatch cardIdentity "*7?00*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*8?00*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9000*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9100*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9200*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9300*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9400*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon HD2600"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon VE"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon Mobility"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon FireGL"

9. Save and close.


That should do it. It worked well for me. Scrolling is NOT smooth as butter, but perfectly acceptable game play at NATIVE resolutions! Also the pixelated cars and weird waves are pretty much gone. If present, a slight scroll one way clears that up. Basically its much more playable, but still has a couple of quirks.

Now if only the Universal Patch can get sound working right!

PLEASE let me know if this works! This is ONLY for the 2600 card for now. And thanks bwatterud for letting me know the html thing. This is my second post here