Video and Sound Issues?

[drahcir1302 0]

Hi everyone, I'm a first time poster, and not too familiar with the way Simtropolis works, but I'm losing hope for solving my issue, and am turning to you guys for your vast knowledge of SimCity. Anyways, at the moment I'm currently running a Power PC G5 Quad-core, 2.5 GHz of processor speed, 4 GBs of memory, an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 graphics card (512 MB), and whatever I could put into the damn machine. So I demand the best from this thing, but whenever I run SimCity 4 and Rush Hour, I just am not seeing the performance I expect. I have no issue running any other game at full performance: World of Warcraft, Civ IV, The Sims 2, RCT3. Yet, SimCity does not run very well. The buildings and detail look great, but all the actions taking place in the city don't render well, and there is always a small lag behind everything I do, whether it be scrolling or clicking the graphs. Now I wouldn't really be bothered by this since SimCity has the reputation for being very demanding on the computer, but my roommate is running his SimCity on a 3-year old Sony Vaio (don't have the specs) with a 256 MB graphics card and his SimCity runs beautifully running at full-capacity. The cars render well and he can scroll throughout his city no problem. His city is a medium-sized city, mine's a small-sized one, and his computer is clearly outperforming mine. My graphic issues are most apparent when I try the U-Drive-It missions (which is also where my sound issues arise.) My sounds will become stuck so that if I honk my horn or turn on sirens, they'll continuously play the half-second clip that it got stuck on. And the video becomes so choppy that I'll miss turns. I don't know what to do. I've talked to Aspyr, and they weren't much help. So hopefully someone here will have the answer I'm looking for. Please, I BEG, someone have an answer to my problem, I love this game and want to enjoy it to it's fullest potential.

[Zelgadis 638]

My new graphics rules.sgr file could help you out there. Check my sig for the download site and read the instructions page about that file.

My game still isn't perfect, but it runs much better with it.

Also, I've heard that, in general (Mac and Windows) SC4 doesn't like multiple processors. I can't help but wonder if that could have something to do with it too...

ISF

[SC4BOY 20]

The reason multi-processors don't work is that the games process scheduler is "built in" because it was written to be compatible with windows 98, DOS and Win 3.x. That scheduler is single threaded. For that reason a multiprocessor doesn't have any "multi-theads" to split.. ergo it doesn't gain from being split (either by multi-proc's or by hyperthreading). Whether the op system and/or hardware chokes on this is the only question.. some do it better than others. The only advantage you'll gain is being able to run more processes in the background.