Game slowed down.

[vershner 11]

Can anyone help me with this issue: Specs: Athlon64 2GHz 2Gb Ram Radeon 9700 Pro (128Mb) WinXp Sp2 DirectX 9c I played SC4 regularly until about a year ago and back then it ran fine on my hardware. I recently started playing again, but the game has slowed down drastically. It's exactly the same SC4 install as I had not removed the game or added anything to it. There have been no hardware changes. The slowdown seems to be graphical. Scrolling in particular is very slow. Slowing to about 1 FPS when scrolling over a large city. Vertical scrolling is considerably slower than horizontal. If I click on a school or hospital with the query tool, the game locks for about 2 seconds. Drawing the range circles seems to be the cause. Zooming in or out is very slow, but then that has always been slow. Things I have looked at: - Switching to software mode fixes the slow down, but it causes other issues. The game looks poorer, and some of the GLR/ELR skins don't work. - Changing resolution made no difference. - Changing visual settings in-game made no difference. - Disabling AV made no difference. - No other programs are taking significant CPU time or memory while SC4 is running. I am very confident I have no malware. - I compressed my plugins folder and that speeded up loading, but made no difference to in-game speed. - Other games do not seem to be running any slower. Has anyone else experienced anything like this or can you offer some suggestions?

[tungston 19]

I believe it is related to the ATI drivers, have you updated the drivers since you played the game before?

[vershner 11]

The driver date is 2nd June 2008 (version 8.501.0.0), so it would seem so. Is there a known good version of the ATI drivers?

[vershner 11]

I just updated to the latest driver version (8.561.0.0) but that's made no difference.

[tungston 19]

I don't have the most recent ATI cards, but since I have played SC4, I have used several different cards. Sometime late in 05 ATI drivers began causing the problem with scrolling, and zooming. I had to use software rendering for the game. When I went with Vista, and DirectX 10, I was able to use hardware rendering with a ATI X1950 Pro.

[vershner 11]

Finally fixed it!

After a whole evening of messing around found that the visual settings in-game don't take effect without a restart, even if the game doesn't pop up the 'restart needed' warning.

Setting shadows to medium, and building draw speed to low, then restarting, sorted the problem.

[Martijn1988 0]

SC4 doesn't seem to like my PC either. Since a couple of days, SC4 is going really slow on my PC for no apparent reasons. I don't have a lot of plugins to keep everything running smoothly, but still it runs very, very slow indeed, even with all grapic options set to low.

Some specs:

AMD Phenom triple core 1.9 GHz

4 Gb RAM

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GS (1024 Mb)

Vista Sp1

64 bit

The really strange thing is, that on my old laptop (2GHz Athlon, 1Gb RAM, 128 Mb video, XP sp2) the game never displayed such troubles while having the same plugins...

If anybody knows a solution to this...

Thanks.

[timofp 0]

Simcity also seems to slow down on my pc,

Geforce 8800gtx

4gb RAM

C2D E6850 3.6ghz

Vista sp1 64bit

[Telordya 0]

vershner, your solution doesn't work for me. I set everything to Low and it is still really slow when I scroll in a large city. Software mode is really smooth but also misses a lot of details. Here's my PC spec:

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Pentium 4 3.2 GHz HT
ASUS P8P800 SE
2 GB RAM
Windows XP Pro SP3

That's really dull because I remember I played this game really smooth in Hardware mode few years ago, and nothing changed on the system, except softwares. I think there's something new in ATI drivers that is making this mess. Nobody has a great solution?

[north country dude 202]

Originally posted by: Martijn1988 SC4 doesn't seem to like my PC either. Since a couple of days, SC4 is going really slow on my PC for no apparent reasons. I don't have a lot of plugins to keep everything running smoothly, but still it runs very, very slow indeed, even with all grapic options set to low.

Some specs:

AMD Phenom triple core 1.9 GHz

4 Gb RAM

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GS (1024 Mb)

Vista Sp1

64 bit

The really strange thing is, that on my old laptop (2GHz Athlon, 1Gb RAM, 128 Mb video, XP sp2) the game never displayed such troubles while having the same plugins...

If anybody knows a solution to this...

Thanks.quote>

Originally posted by: timofp Simcity also seems to slow down on my pc,

Geforce 8800gtx

4gb RAM

C2D E6850 3.6ghz

Vista sp1 64bitquote>

Discussions about your problems and possible solutions can be found here and here.

Since you are both using nVidia GPUs, the problem may be with the multi-core CPUs. First thing is to make sure you are using the latest drivers and BIOS for those CPUs, if that still doesn't solve the problem, try setting the processor affinity for SC4 to use a single CPU.

Originally posted by: Telordya

vershner, your solution doesn't work for me. I set everything to Low and it is still really slow when I scroll in a large city. Software mode is really smooth but also misses a lot of details. Here's my PC spec:

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro

Pentium 4 3.2 GHz HT

ASUS P8P800 SE

2 GB RAM

Windows XP Pro SP3

That's really dull because I remember I played this game really smooth in Hardware mode few years ago, and nothing changed on the system, except softwares. I think there's something new in ATI drivers that is making this mess. Nobody has a great solution?quote>

Your problem may be with the ATI Radeon card,...is there a way to rollback to the drivers that were working? If not, check this thread for possible solutions,...as I don't have an ATI video card, I cannot tell you how to modify the "Graphics Rules.sgr" and "Video Cards.sgr" files to accept your GPU for Hardware Rendering, but I have listed a small utility on that thread that should help you figure out how to do it yourself.

If that doesn't help, check to make sure you have the latest drivers for your CPU and an updated BIOS.

[Telordya 0]

Thanks for the prompt reply north country dude. The solution in the thread you gave me really helped. This current thread and the other one you gave me should be always first in the forum. I am sure that there is a lot of other people with this problem and that they would like to play SC4 smoothly.

[Telordya 0]

If there is somebody who knows a lot about ATI cards, take a look at the utility ATI Tray Tools : http://www.guru3d.com/article/ati-tray-tools-/

Maybe we could disable some features introduced in new drivers that break SimCity 4 compatibility. However, there are too many of them and I don't know what they all do. They have names like "VolTxEnable" or "Enable Raster Guardband". We'll need a real specialist to understand all this.

[tungston 19]

Radeon 9800 Pro
Pentium 4 3.2 GHz HT
ASUS P8P800 SE
2 GB

Originally posted by: Telordya

vershner, your solution doesn't work for me. I set everything to Low and it is still really slow when I scroll in a large city. Software mode is really smooth but also misses a lot of details. Here's my PC spec:quote>

Did you set the options back to high when you tried software rendering? 

[Telordya 0]

Yes, when I am in software mode, I assure that all my settings are set to High and Enabled. After that, in gameplay, if I compare Hardware and Software mode, I don't see any differences graphically, except for shadows. In Software mode, there are projected shadows of buildings, trees and other stuffs but they are really blurry.