SC4 performance on various Macs

[Crissa 1]

I have several Macs, but mostly they're identical. A 2 GHz iMac, a 2 GHz Mac Pro (which I don't get to use) and a 2 GHz Macbook (but it does have 4G ram instead of the 2G on the other two). They're a bit old. I do know that the video card on the iMac and Pro is better than the Macbook, and that they don't make horrible wheezing (fans) when playing the games. However, SimCity is slow on any of them, since day one.

Does anyone have experience running SC4 on other Macs? Looking at it, it should run much better on a core than has a flat faster clock - so while going to a 4-core won't do anything, going to the 3.6 GHz would give a 50% performance boost, as would doubling the graphical memory to 512.

-Crissa

[TEG24601 32]

To be perfectly honest, because the Machines are Intel, it really won't matter much what you do. The game was designed for PPC (read G4 and G5) Macs, with a minimum of 32 MB of video RAM and a 700Mhz processor. If you are running the original version from the Disc, it will run at basically the same speed regardless of how fast your Intel Macs are, and it will be choppy due to Rosetta having to transcode the game on the fly. If you install the Universal Binary patch from Aspyr, it may run faster, but the route query tool will be almost useless and you may run into graphics issues. More RAM is good, but more than likely anything over 4 GB won't be used, as the game is only 32 bit, and I doubt if it will get anywhere close to the 4 GB mark.

That being said, I've run SC4:Deluxe on 2 PPC machines and one Intel Machine (iMac 24" 2.4 GHz, with 2 GB of RAM). On the Intel Machine it ran just fine, with some minor graphics glitches, so you should be fine. Most of the glitches were ironed out as I replaced a couple of files in the game, and adjusted my plug-ins. Use whichever machine you want to use, or better yet, take your Sim City 4 folder from your documents folder between the computers and enjoy.

TEG

[Bizzeh 0]

I have the latest design Macbook with a 2.26GHz. I've only had it about 8 months but I swear blind it runs SC4 better than any windows based system I've used it on and that includes a quad core @ 3.6GHz I have upstairs for gaming.

I've just put 8GB in my MacBook and an SSD, suffice to say this game now runs bonkers fast.

Time to start filling up the plug-ins folder to see if that can upset it!

[+Guest]

I run SC:D son a Black MacBook SGhz Intel Core Duo and with medium and big cities I have the problem that the game doesn't run smoothly... I had to set the grafic option to the worste possible

[Furikabute 0]

MacBook pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, OS X 10.6.8

I play Deluxe version with just the NAM plugin and honestly, it lags and creates random graphical glitches, one thing it helped me reducing the lag a bit

was turning to low the Buildings drawing speed setting.

Also tried installing the Universal patch but everytime I started a new city it would just shut down.

[skyjuice 12]

I've got the latest MBPro 13". never played on it, not SC4, id want to get it for MAC, Lion. any warnings other than above. the cheapest New macbook pro is it that i ve got.

My old PC with XP isn't that fast, especially running SC4 deluxe.

[goodyou 0]

Time to start filling up the plug-ins folder to see if that can upset it!http://www.dubaa.info/g.gif