Very very choppy game play

[Don Fonz 0]

Hello, i have just got this game ive installed it and now the game play is very choppy, and pretty much unplayable. Ive tried lowering the graphics settings which have made no difference what so ever.

My pc isnt great, but im sure it should be playing the game better than this, because it is pretty much too slow to play at the moment, eg a couple a frames per second. I have the latest drivers ect for my hardware.

My relevant specs are

Intel Quad Core Q6600 2.4GHZ

3GB 667MHZ RAM

Nvidia Geforce 9800GT 512MB

Windows Vista Home Premium

Any ideas welcome

[HeroIV 0]

Is it choppy from the get go or does it get choppy when there are more and more people in your cities?

I don't think it is graphics related but a purely CPU related issue. CXL runs on just one core.

[Teeril 0]

The game seems to have some serious resource leaks, you can work around it by going back to the planet view everytime it gets choppy and entering your city again.

If it's slow from the get go, then I have no idea why, your system shouldn't have any problems with it.

[Don Fonz 0]

Yea im aware that CXL runs on just one core, however the L2 cach and other things on my processor that determine the overall speed of the CPU, excluding the clock speed are pretty good, so know its not a CPU issue on my behalf.

Yea it is slow from the word go, nothing on my G15 keyboard my CPU meter and my RAM usage meter are no where near full, so i dont think the memory leak has kicked in yet, but some other underlying issue, im tempted to install XP on my other partition and reinstall Cities XL on that and see what happens. To put it into perspective im getting more performace from my old old system, which uses a Sempron CPU, less than a gig of RAM, and intergrated Geforce 6100LE graphics! i say more, but just a bit!

Thanks for your input so far, im gonna keep trying to sort this problem out, any more ideas welcome, and ill keep you updated on my findings aswell.

[lots 0]

CXL seems to suffer from some major efficiency issues. Just from my own experiences playing, it seems that once i get a sufficiently complex road network up, crap hits the fan. To me, it appears that whatever algorithm they are using for traffic annalysis, path finding, etc for the road networks starts to break down the more complex the roads get, and the more people that have to use them. Its painfully obvious something is up as you try to build new roads under these conditions. The system slows to a crawl as the new road is connected and added and new traffic flow computed.

This also doesn't seem to be limited to just slower CPUs. Even the beefier CPUs out there seem to have issues with the game eventually. Granted they can probably handle it a bit more .

Anyway for your problem, have you gotten the latest drivers for your GPU and such?

[shawnfog 0]

The game should not be running that slow on your setup, it far exceeds the recommended requirements. Ensure you are running the lastest video card drivers. I can't really think of any in game settings that could degrade performance that bad either but you might want to use a reset to defaults option if the game has such a thing. I'm betting it is driver related though.

[raijala 0]

I have similar issues on my system.  I am quite dissapointed that the game is not multithreaded.  I have an i7 920 @ 3.6ghz, 12gb ddr3, GTX260 768mb and 15krpm SAS raid0.  The game seems to progressively get slower the longer I play.  This is not an issue with drivers or background processes.  The game saturates my first logical core while the rest remain idle, this is unacceptable in todays world of multicore and hyperthreaded systems.

[raijala 0]

I tried disabling hyperthreading to see if i could squeeze a bit more out of a single core for CitiesXL but it is still using 100%.  I don't think the problem is memory leaking, the process seems to stay around 700-800mb which isn't a problem for my system.  It actually begins lagging around 20k-30k citizens.  Laying out zones starts having a couple second delay and trying to run a road while scrolling is serious choppyness.

[PAFC2004 0]

I can confirm this is likely due to CPU issues. I've got a Q6600 (2.4 factory clock) and overclocked it to 2.8... running fine now.

[Don Fonz 0]

Heres an update, firstly its nothing to do with the CPU being at 2.4ghz, thats ample speed especially considering the L1 and L2 cache of the processor, which is far more important than its clock speed. The problem lies within Windows Vista, as i have dual booted XP and the game runs flawlessly, smooth as a babys behind and no lag whatsoever even on the biggest of citys. So until i work out whats causing it to lag in Vista ill be running on XP which isnt that much of a head ache really.