Poor Game Performance

[bubbabimmer06 0]

Well ever since my 3 year old HP laptop finally crashed on me a few months ago (taking my old Gazelle City region with it), I went out and bought a new Sony VAIO NS130 from Circuit City.

The computer has Vista Home Premium, Pentium dual core 2.00ghz and 4GB of RAM. Seeing as how it ran on my old laptop (AMD Turion dual core 1.6ghz, 1GB RAM, 256MB Nvidia GeForceGO), I figured that the game would run wonderfully on the Sony.

I was a bit strapped for cash this time around and got a good deal on the VAIO ($549 +200 for a now worthless Circuit City warranty). The computer runs Vista very well in its highest graphic settings and all that with a ton of stuff running even, but when I finally installed Sim City and went to play the game, I was instantly dissappointed.

Even on a medium sized map with a 22,000 resident city, the game is really slow to render and it gets worse when you try to scroll across the map. It gets so bad the more the game continues in time that its annoying the point that I don't want to play it anymore.

I was thinking that it was due to the fact that the laptop has that Intel GMA integrated graphic nonsense. I've tried to see if I could direct more processing power and RAM towards the video memory, but the setting for the GMA driver are pretty redudant. Even closing out all other programs doesn't really help and now I'm very dissappointed with the computer that I was once happy with. Any suggestions?

[De Ja Vu 117]

It's the same for me...I can play any game in the world without lag, but SC4 is the only one that lags...

The problem is that SC4 wasn't made for todays high-end computers, but it was made for simple ones when the game was released...

I bet it has poor performance even on NASA-s computers

[bubbabimmer06 0]

Could it be the fact that the game may not have been designed to operate on two cores? Even that is weird though, because my HP laptop ran it pretty well for the most part. There was always lag, but not this much.

[bubbabimmer06 0]

I really want to get back into the city stuff as I have written a few novels that take place in a fictional city and would like to have some kind of reference map. I'm even considering moving the game to an old Pentium 4 desktop or something like that lo.

[DocRorlach 25]

The graphics card is certainly a bit of a problem, but if other games run fine, then the settings & command line options of SC4 are most likely at fault. Take a look at this tutorial, especially at the various graphics options.

Moreover, check if your onboard graphics controller has any rendering/OpenGL settings, and if acceleration is set to software or hardware. It will take some experimenting to find out which is which.

Finally, take a look at your plug-ins folder. If you used to play a while, chances are you acquired a fair bit in plug-ins. You might want to consider a) DAT-packing and reorganizing your plug-ins folder.

Last, but certainly not least, try this: load the game to region view; ALT-TAB to the desktop, the CTRL-ALT-DEL to the Task Manager. On the Processes Tab find the SC4 EXE and right click on it, then select first Affinity (assign it to CPU0), then set Priority to High or Real Time (depending on your OS Version).

Since you have an AMD, you might want to scoure their web site for dual-core optimizer download (I am not certain about the name, but I've seen other threads mentioning it).

Hope this helps

[jabezscratch 159]

SC4 game performance varies greatly depending upon city size, the size of your plug-in folder, and the number and type of mods used.

You may want to try playing the game in software (as opposed to hardware) rendering mode. Also, defrag your harddrive often. SC4 runs a lot

[mindaugas 18]

I found "-CPUPriority:low -CPUCount:X" to be a big help on my Core2 laptop. If you are not going to do anything else but play simcity set -CPUPriority:high. You can find out how many cores you have by using CTRL + SHIFT + ESC and then click on performance. If you have two columns under CPU History you have 2 cores. 2 cores would equal "-CPUCount:2" in your start parameters on the short cut.

You've got an Intel GMA 4500MHD, not sure how those perform but my Macbook with GMA 950 is really slow. My Dell has a 7900GS and SC flies on it, My PC has a Radeon 4850 which is probably 3 times the power of the 7900 and I get cruddy little artifacts. So I'm stuck playing SC on the Dell only. I wish maxis/EA/Wright spent less time on Spore and more time on making us SC5

[DocRorlach 25]

If you do have a dual core machine AND it is Intel-based, there is a permanent solution: read the Omnibus tutorial covering this.