video card v.s. sim city

[jonle1 0]

Hello all!  My question is about what video graphics card is the best and cheapest for sim city 4.  I just bough a new computer but i am taking it back today because it was slow and I hated windows vista.

Does anyone else out there have a fast computer that can handle a city population of +250k because that is when my current computer slows down very fast...the praphics card that was with the new HP was a NVDIA 512mb Gforce 9500 with 8 gb of ram and a pentium 2 quad processor q82002.

Thank you all!!!

[kingdiz_55 12]

pentium 2 quad processor q82002? I believe it's a core 2 quad. SC4 doesn't run well with that big of a population.Hmm. I'll try it with my 9600GT 1GB and tell you what the results are.

[SC4BOY 20]

The video card really plays very little role in the SC4 game.. The CPU does almost all the work (GPU only does special effects like explosions and clouds etc). I believe all are agreed that the best computer FOR SC4 ONLY would be a VERY FAST single CPU unit (SC4 is single threaded and has its scheduler built into the code rather than passed off to the CPU scheduliing hardware). The most primitive GPU would work fine for SC4 as it was designed for video in approximately 2000, however the MEMORY of the GPU still acts as the "picture window" for SC4 so it would be nice if you had a video card with a large amount (at least 1 Gb) of fast (DDR5 perhaps) memory. Of course as far as I know, no one makes a computer like that .. But the closer you get to that, the better it will run SC4.. now will it be best for the rest of your general computing needs? Probably not..