Please Help!!!

[rose12 0]

Hello!

I've got a little problem with Sim City 4 Deluxe Edition.

on my old computer the game worked ok. ( pentium 4 2,4 GHz, GF 7600 GS 256 MB)

when I bought a new computer my problem appeared. Instalation process was perfect, but when I started a new game in new city it all became wrong. The game and graphic was wery slow. When I shot down the shadows the game was a little faster but just a little. Sim City should work perfect on my new computer (Intel Core2 Duo 2,66 GHz, Radeon HD 4830 512 MB)

I don't kno what to do and why is that so? Please HELP!!!

[Randomtaskk 1]

Newest drivers installed?

Set to hardware render not software?

Are you playing at a higher resolution with your new pc? That will obv. impact performance.

[ArchangelMichael 51]

@rose12 -- there are two potential sources for the problem.  One is the fact that SimCity4 was published before the advent of multi-core systems and, as such, was not coded to take advantage of more than one processor.  Check out this thread for some info on how to make it access only one processor, and this thread for some more info about setting the game's priority.

The other problem is that SimCity4 doesn't seem to like ATI video cards.  Updating to the latest driver may help.  If setting the affinity and priority (as described in the links above) and applying the most up-to-date video driver do not help, your choices, as far as I know, are to only play the game on your old computer (if you still have it) or purchase a video card made by nVidia.  I'm no expert, however, and have never experienced serious crashing or lagging of this nature.  Hopefully another member can help you more.  Try searching here and at sc4devotion.com for "ATI" or "video card" to see if someone has posted a method for making the game and the video card work in harmony.

[north country dude 202]

Originally posted by: ArchangelMichael @rose12 -- there are two potential sources for the problem.  One is the fact that SimCity4 was published before the advent of multi-core systems and, as such, was not coded to take advantage of more than one processor.  Check out this thread for some info on how to make it access only one processor, and this thread for some more info about setting the game's priority.

The other problem is that SimCity4 doesn't seem to like ATI video cards.  Updating to the latest driver may help.  If setting the affinity and priority (as described in the links above) and applying the most up-to-date video driver do not help, your choices, as far as I know, are to only play the game on your old computer (if you still have it) or purchase a video card made by nVidia.  I'm no expert, however, and have never experienced serious crashing or lagging of this nature.  Hopefully another member can help you more.  Try searching here and at sc4devotion.com for "ATI" or "video card" to see if someone has posted a method for making the game and the video card work in harmony.quote>

Setting up for one processor will help as you indicated. Some in-depth discussion about Software versus Hardware rendering can be found in this thread.

Not all ATI cards were considered "slow" according to the "Graphics Rules.sgr" file as written in 2003, but, many were. I've posted an excerpt from the "Graphics Rules.sgr" in that thread that shows which video cards were considered problematic in 2003.

As it turns out, "Graphics Rules.sgr" and "Video Cards.sgr" can be modified or updated to accept your current video card. Another thing that would be helpful is setting the current GPU attributes to run SimCity4.exe with certain attributes turned off, or set to "application controlled".