Huge Lag on Monster System

[OM3N 20]

Hi guys. So my old Graphics card crashed (8800 GTS) after 2 and a half years. Always played SC4 without much problems, although it did get laggy when I made huge cities. Other relevant specs

Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz

Windows XP Custom

So I got a new ATi 5770 today, and it puts any game to shame, but SC4 is like insaaanely slow. 1 second lag, 1 second play, 1 second lag etc. It is basically unplayable!

I do use over a gig of plugins, but that didn't cause much problem before. I just don't see how it could be running this much worse with a new and vastly superior graphics card?!

Any ideas are appreciated!

[OM3N 20]

Someone over at SC4D said something about this in an older thread.

"Set SC4 to use just one core of the processor: Right-click the SimCity icon, select "Properties" and add " -CPUCount:1" to the target path."

But it gives me an error when I try to do that.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Can you show the exact string you added in the target path field, and the exact wording of the error message?

[OM3N 20]

-CPUCount:1 Is what I put in the target path.

I can't copy the error for some reason.

I switched from hardware to software rendering, and it is a bit quicker. But I can't have full graphics that way.

[tungston 19]

The drivers for ATI cards cause exstreme lag with some cards when using hardware rendering. Try setting the game graphics options to software rendering to see if that helps.

[OM3N 20]

Shoot. This seems to be the consensus. I can do software rendering, but it feels dumb playing with mediocre graphics when I just spent my paycheck on a graphics card hehe.

Oh well, I'll live.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Well, I still haven't seen the entire string you entered into that link. Since you got an error message, your game probably stil runs on both cores, so there's probably something wrong. If the entire target path is "CPUCount:1", then it's no wonder it doesn't work. It should be something like "[Drive Letter]:\[Path]\Simcity4.exe -CPUCount:1" or similar (I'm not at my home PC atm). It would be helpful to know what the error message says, too, and at what particular point it pops up. Does it appear when you attempt to modify the target path, after you modified the target path, when you exit the window, when you try to start the game...?

[tungston 19]

Originally posted by: OM3N

Shoot. This seems to be the consensus. I can do software rendering, but it feels dumb playing with mediocre graphics when I just spent my paycheck on a graphics card hehe.

Oh well, I'll live.quote>

SC4 only requires mediocre graphics, it doesn't take advantage of recent high end graphics.  The amount of video memory, up to 128MB has more benefits.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

I can confirm this. Since I don't play anything with too demanding graphics, I still use an ancient Geforce 4 Ti4200 with 128 MB of video RAM, and it works perfectly. It's simply not the bottleneck in case of SimCity 4. If I had a 6 Ghz CPU, I'd see a huge increase. If I could use more RAM, I'd see a huge increase. If I had a faster HD, I'd see a huge increase. But if I had four high-end graphics adapters in crossfire / SLI mode, the game wouldn't run a fraction of a percent faster. There's simply next to nothing to render, it's almost entirely 2D display.

So a high-end graphics chip will basically be bored to death while the CPU is sweating to calculate all those interdependent, dynamic effects and run all the micro-simulators, your RAM is flooded with ridiculously large 2D data, and your HDD can hardly keep up reading gigabytes of textures and other data and sending it to the system.