Why is this?

[legoman786 1]

I am no stranger to computers and all the technical know-how.

But one thing I am really bugged on is why does the game run EXTREMELY choppy when using hardware rendering and runs real smooth when in software render mode?

I have all my drivers updated, not the beta versions, I shy away from anything thats beta.

I have reinstalled SC4 Deluxe twice and still no go.

Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2140 1.6Ghz

2GB DDR2-800 RAM running in dual channel

Diamond ATi Radeon HD3850 256MB

And I have the game installed on my Seagate Barracuda 500GB HD

My pagefile is set to the bare minimum without taking any hits from performance. I have defragged both my HDs using O&O Defrag 10.

I can play Call of Duty 4 just fine on 1280x1024 with everything on high, Why can't I play SC4 using hardware rendering?? I think this is just absurd.

I love Simtropolis and SC. SC for allowing me to be real creative and think about developments, and Simtropolis for providing extremely insightful guides and mods for doing so. I hope to be a somewhat active member here.

[s_olah 87]

I'm always surprised when somebody writes something like this...I have a pretty old computer, two-thirds of the performance as the one above "me"...and sim city runs smoothly on it...even with a gig of plugins...

Welcome to Simtropolis...and sorry I couldn't help...

[legoman786 1]

I was looking around and apparently this only happens with ATI cards. For some reason, they don't play nice with hardware rendering on SC4.

[ixnayonthetimmay 16]

SC4 is very resource intensive. Very. Even six years after its release, it manages to bring systems down to a crawl. They should use it as a benchmark in those PC magazines.

Personally, I think it is a victory if one can manage to get the game to a stable point whereby it doesn't crash every 20 minutes. I think, however, you're right about what you said about ATI; I have an Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT, and the game runs wonderfully in Hardware render mode.

[legoman786 1]

EA should make some patches for this game and optimize the coding a bit. I'm gonna do some poking around with some programs I have to see if I can make the game run any faster without actually modifying it.