Sim City 4 Lagging

[pieuponieu 70]

I just got a new PC and installed the game with Steam.  The default renderer was hardware, and I got terrible artifacts in the big city tutorial.  I changed it to software, and they disappeared.  I have an NVIDIA GTX 850M and 4GB of dedicated video RAM, so I would have thought hardware would be the better choice.  

 

What's the consensus on this?  Hardware or software?  Does it differ depending on whether you're running from CD, Steam, or some other download version? 

 

I thought about buying a new disk, but because my old one is stuck in the disk drive of a laptop that no longer boots and has no power, I thought maybe it was time to graduate to Steam, which I use for other games.  

 

(Now I get to enjoy downloading all my favorite plugins again!)

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

No matter how advanced your video card may be, remember that SC4 is a A.D. 2003 program.  Try it with hardware rendering, but turn off all the 3D options and advanced things that didn't exist in that era like automatic anti-aliasing.  If it works, you can then experiment with turning some of the features on, one at a time until you find the acceptable set.

 

You might have to edit the file Graphics Rules.sgr to include your card.

 

If you could get your hands on it, the best O/S to run this program is probably Windows 98 with a Pentium processor.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

You might have to edit the file Graphics Rules.sgr to include your card.

 

As the calendar keeps turning, and SC4 gets older and older, this is becoming a necessity.  Any graphics card less than 5 years old probably won't play well with SC4 out of the box.

 

There's a tutorial for doing this  It's tricky; you are best off adding several lines in both the Graphics Rules.sgr and Video Cards.sgr, as it can be hard to determine the exact name of your card.  For example, in your case, you want to add "Nvidia*GTX*", "NVIDIA*GTX*", "NVIDIA*GTX*850*M*", "NVIDIA*GTX 850M", and so on.  As many alternatives as you can think of, to make sure you get the right one in there somewhere.

 

Be sure to follow the formats shown in the tutorial.  The OP's second post tells you how to find the string ID ( e.g. 0x1234 ) of the card.

 

Once you get this done, you should be able to play in hardware rendering without issues.  I just had to go through this today with my new laptop.