Sim City 4 Performance

[iv76erson03 2]

Couldn't find an exact thread on this, so I thought I'd throw a new one out there.

Basically, my computer is lagging when I have a large city filled up with a ton of population. It renders slow and scrolls slow. My system is as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.4Ghz

2GB DDR2 800 Memory

nVidia 9600 GT 512MB

1TB 7200RPM WD Hard Drive

Windows 7 Home Premium

I play the game at a customer resolution of 1680 x 1050 with everything turned on. My CPU is running between 50-65% load, and I'm using about 1.2-1.4GB out of my 2GB of RAM. Not sure about the Video Card load, I'm going to check into that.

My question is, should I be lagging? Does anyone have any idea what my bottleneck is? I realize that I don't have the fastest computer in the world, but it blows the recommended system requirements away. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[TownMaster2005 79]

I am running the game on a machine with pretty much the same spec and started to get the problems which I think you are experiencing. I solved it by taking some time out from the game and selectively datpacking folder.

The boffins say you should not datpack NAM so I left that. And what I did was pull out all the growables and datpack those into reasonable size files. Found doing it by creator was the best as it gives a way of managing new lots. Similarly a lot of the utility lots, airports, seaports, park, etc I did a big clean out. We often download thing because they look good and then we find they are not used. We all have our favourites and it is really the growing stuff which gives me the variety that I am looking for. So I went through with a critical eye and moved those to a separate folder out of plugins.

Got DAMN up and running properly and put stuff into that so that the menu structure loads quicker, by not having look for the long list. Similarly with all the other menu type items. If you only use them every now and then, like airports which if you have them is a long list and it is not something you are building all the time, so why have it on tap. Remove all readme,s pictures, etc, anything that had nothing to do with the lot growing or plopping in game is gone.

Result is I now have in my plugins folder about 1500 files and it is still just over 2GB and I still need to tackle the PEG lots. Found the game loads faster and generally moves a lot quicker.

[Tysons4 68]

turn the shadows down to low in the in-game graphic options and things will be less laggy. graphics cards went the way of the first person perspective, so even today graphics cards will chug when displaying tri-metric shadow.

  Edited March 14, 2011 by Tysons4  

[iv76erson03 2]

The shadow trick worked pretty well. I really don't notice too much of a visual difference either. I really don't have that many downloaded files (yet). I just sort of took up the game after 5 years off. Still a great game, especially with all of the add-ons.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The reason for lag on large cities full of objects is plain. You only have so many computer cycles, even if you run on real time. As the city gets bigger, the processing loop gets to the point where the game cannot get around it without showing its inability to do so without messing up the animation.

The solution of reducing shadows is a good temporary fix, but will also eventually run out. The only fix here is a faster CPU.

[iv76erson03 2]

The reason for lag on large cities full of objects is plain. You only have so many computer cycles, even if you run on real time. As the city gets bigger, the processing loop gets to the point where the game cannot get around it without showing its inability to do so without messing up the animation.

The solution of reducing shadows is a good temporary fix, but will also eventually run out. The only fix here is a faster CPU.

I would have thought it was my low memory before it was my CPU. The CPU never gets close to full load. Still, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to upgrade it. I should downclock it to 2.0 Ghz and upclock it to 2.6 and see if I notice much of a difference. On another note, I wonder if anyone has tried playing the game with a workstation quality card such as a ATI Fire or a nVidia Quadro. I would think those might render this type of a high-texture, top-down game faster than consumer cards would because the consumer cards aren't necessarily made for that.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The reason for lag on large cities full of objects is plain. You only have so many computer cycles, even if you run on real time. As the city gets bigger, the processing loop gets to the point where the game cannot get around it without showing its inability to do so without messing up the animation.

The solution of reducing shadows is a good temporary fix, but will also eventually run out. The only fix here is a faster CPU.

I would have thought it was my low memory before it was my CPU. The CPU never gets close to full load. Still, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to upgrade it. I should downclock it to 2.0 Ghz and upclock it to 2.6 and see if I notice much of a difference. On another note, I wonder if anyone has tried playing the game with a workstation quality card such as a ATI Fire or a nVidia Quadro. I would think those might render this type of a high-texture, top-down game faster than consumer cards would because the consumer cards aren't necessarily made for that.

The other item that might slow you down is lack of memory. If you have a big plugin suite, you may be paging quite a bit. Check your page file statistics.

[Mister Giggles 310]

Edited out of existence. Bad information.
 

  Edited June 23, 2013 by Mister Giggles  

[z1 566]

I would have thought it was my low memory before it was my CPU. The CPU never gets close to full load.

Actually, it does. SC4 always takes up exactly 100% of one CPU, even when it's paused. Since you're running a Core 2 Duo, this is displayed as 50% of your total CPU resources.

Having had the luxury of multiple hard drives, multiple computers, and multiple operating systems, I can safely lay the blame for lag in SC4 with most modern computers at the feet of Vista/7.

I have found just the opposite. For me, SC4 ran better on Vista than on XP, and it runs best of all on Windows 7. No more crashes, other than those specifically known to be due to game bugs. Speed is slightly better as well, probably due to graphics drivers.

[Mister Giggles 310]

Really? That's actually quite surprising. What's your video card? Heck, what're your computer specs?

  Edited April 6, 2011 by Mister Giggles  

[hitlike 0]

I'll loan this thread becouse I'm having same issues.

Firstly my pc specs:

CPU: E8400, dual core at 3.2Ghz

Graphics: Ati Radeon HD4870 1Gb

RAM: 4Gb (of which my 32bit winXP can utilize 3.3Gb)

So my PC is fairly modern and I have kept it tidy/clean/defragged and so on. It can run pretty much all brand new games with high graphic settings. I surely wasn't expecting older game like SC4 to give it such a hard time.

For example my biggest city this far, which has about 350,000 citizens is almost unplayable if you make the mistake and zoom further away. All together its not enjoyable to play any larger city becouse of any quick movement across the map or zooming, or even laying a longer road is very, very slow and sluggish.

Here are my current settings (note that the resolution is custom widescreen)

Is there anything I can do about this issue or is it just the coding of the game? For example does SC4 utilize multiple cores of your CPU or only one?

Thanks if anyone can help.

  Edited April 8, 2011 by hitlike  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Interesting. Why do you run software rendering? Have you tried it on hardware with all the options turned off on the nVidia card? You could set them to "application selected", and let each program set what it needs. Saves a lot of guessing, and most programs are smart enough to set themselves up.

Maybe it is also time to leave XP's 32-bit decor and try the 64-bit decor. I believe there is a 64-bit version of XP if you want to avoid going to Windows 7, but the two operating systems are the same meat with different gravy. XP is really NT 5.x, and W7 is NT 6.1, so it is not a big leap to a different decor. Changing to a higher band-width will increase your capabilities.

[Mister Giggles 310]

Interesting. Why do you run software rendering? Have you tried it on hardware with all the options turned off on the nVidia card? You could set them to "application selected", and let each program set what it needs. Saves a lot of guessing, and most programs are smart enough to set themselves up.

Maybe it is also time to leave XP's 32-bit decor and try the 64-bit decor. I believe there is a 64-bit version of XP if you want to avoid going to Windows 7, but the two operating systems are the same meat with different gravy. XP is really NT 5.x, and W7 is NT 6.1, so it is not a big leap to a different decor. Changing to a higher band-width will increase your capabilities.

Similar. It's more like pork and chicken, both white meat, but different. Vista and 7 are fundamentally different than XP, with a lot of the underlying mechanics changed/rebuilt. 7, however, is essentially the Windows 98 Second Edition of Vista. Better overall, but not the big leap Vista was from XP.

Moving from 32 to 64 bit isn't that big an improvement. Sure, the processor can shove off twice the information at once but the architecture also sucks up more memory, programs have to be built specifically for it, and there's not much of a speed increase. The biggest benefit, at the moment, is the ability to use 4+ gigs of ram. I still recommend upgrading to a 64 bit operating system when possible, but it'll be years before the majority of games/programs can really benefit from being natively 64-bit.

That said, avoid XP 64. In my mind, it was never ready for showtime, and if you're really hankering for 64-bit deliciousness, go for 7. Or a Ubuntu distro, if you're into Linux. And free.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

UBUNTU 10.10 64-bit release is stable and works fine with the wine 1.2 interpretation layer. You have to use winetricks to load the C run time into your environment, and, of course, install the game. It quite happily dual boots with any O/S.

It is free for the download. Just pull it in, and make the ISO following the instructions on the site. Be sure you get 10.10 because the site is currently flogging the 11.04 Beta1 version, and I have it. It is not ready for people, especially operating system novices. The release date for 11.04 is the end of this month if you want to wait for it.

[hitlike 0]

Interesting. Why do you run software rendering? Have you tried it on hardware with all the options turned off on the nVidia card? You could set them to "application selected", and let each program set what it needs. Saves a lot of guessing, and most programs are smart enough to set themselves up.

Maybe it is also time to leave XP's 32-bit decor and try the 64-bit decor. I believe there is a 64-bit version of XP if you want to avoid going to Windows 7, but the two operating systems are the same meat with different gravy. XP is really NT 5.x, and W7 is NT 6.1, so it is not a big leap to a different decor. Changing to a higher band-width will increase your capabilities.

I run software rendering becouse in hardware rendering the game is utterly unplayable due to lag and sluggishes of any decent size city. I'll guess SC4 doesn't like ATI or viceversa, I used to have Nvidia 8800GT when they were new and if I remember right, SC4 did not give me any performance issues back then when I played it for a while eventhough the card itself is considerably weaker than my current one.

  Edited April 9, 2011 by hitlike  

[Mister Giggles 310]

Interesting. Why do you run software rendering? Have you tried it on hardware with all the options turned off on the nVidia card? You could set them to "application selected", and let each program set what it needs. Saves a lot of guessing, and most programs are smart enough to set themselves up.

Maybe it is also time to leave XP's 32-bit decor and try the 64-bit decor. I believe there is a 64-bit version of XP if you want to avoid going to Windows 7, but the two operating systems are the same meat with different gravy. XP is really NT 5.x, and W7 is NT 6.1, so it is not a big leap to a different decor. Changing to a higher band-width will increase your capabilities.

I run software rendering becouse in hardware rendering the game is utterly unplayable due to lag and sluggishes of any decent size city. I'll guess SC4 doesn't like ATI or viceversa, I used to have Nvidia 8800GT when they were new and if I remember right, SC4 did not give me any performance issues back then when I played it for a while eventhough the card itself is considerably weaker than my current one.

The GPU, I find, is rarely a help to performance. After a certain point (2008, I wager, even the cheap onboard ones) any GPU can handle whatever SC4 throws at it. However, GPUs can certainly HURT, because they may lack firmware and programming that older/different series of cards have that SC4 takes advantage of. It's a confusing mess, really, what works and what doesn't.

Regardless, I've heard that with a strong enough CPU that you don't need to worry about having a good GPU at all. This does make sense, because CPUs are fantastic at calculations...which is what SC4 is. SC4, under the hood, is a series of hundreds of extremely complex formulas and mathematical equations all interconnected. The graphics on the other hand are typical early 2k.

When you add a building to a city, the GPU has to use a few hundred kilobytes to a couple megs to draw that building (SC4 uses some mechanism that only keeps segments of the city loaded in graphic memory at once). This is pretty easy for modern GPUs. However, that building also creates a demand for the CPU to connect it up to the network grid and figure out what goes and comes there, along with other information. THIS is dealt with as long as the city is running. The more buildings, the more connections, the more the CPU has to do...the more lag.

Thus, in my opinion, the CPU portion of the computer is much more important than the GPU portion. The GPU portion requires much less hardware than the CPU portion does, and thus in case of compatibility problems having the CPU render the game as well as run it is a superior option than trying to figure out why a 2003 game doesn't like working with seemingly random graphics cards.

[Loney 22]

Interesting. Why do you run software rendering? Have you tried it on hardware with all the options turned off on the nVidia card? You could set them to "application selected", and let each program set what it needs. Saves a lot of guessing, and most programs are smart enough to set themselves up.

Maybe it is also time to leave XP's 32-bit decor and try the 64-bit decor. I believe there is a 64-bit version of XP if you want to avoid going to Windows 7, but the two operating systems are the same meat with different gravy. XP is really NT 5.x, and W7 is NT 6.1, so it is not a big leap to a different decor. Changing to a higher band-width will increase your capabilities.

I run software rendering becouse in hardware rendering the game is utterly unplayable due to lag and sluggishes of any decent size city. I'll guess SC4 doesn't like ATI or viceversa, I used to have Nvidia 8800GT when they were new and if I remember right, SC4 did not give me any performance issues back then when I played it for a while eventhough the card itself is considerably weaker than my current one.

The GPU, I find, is rarely a help to performance. After a certain point (2008, I wager, even the cheap onboard ones) any GPU can handle whatever SC4 throws at it. However, GPUs can certainly HURT, because they may lack firmware and programming that older/different series of cards have that SC4 takes advantage of. It's a confusing mess, really, what works and what doesn't.

Regardless, I've heard that with a strong enough CPU that you don't need to worry about having a good GPU at all. This does make sense, because CPUs are fantastic at calculations...which is what SC4 is. SC4, under the hood, is a series of hundreds of extremely complex formulas and mathematical equations all interconnected. The graphics on the other hand are typical early 2k.

When you add a building to a city, the GPU has to use a few hundred kilobytes to a couple megs to draw that building (SC4 uses some mechanism that only keeps segments of the city loaded in graphic memory at once). This is pretty easy for modern GPUs. However, that building also creates a demand for the CPU to connect it up to the network grid and figure out what goes and comes there, along with other information. THIS is dealt with as long as the city is running. The more buildings, the more connections, the more the CPU has to do...the more lag.

Thus, in my opinion, the CPU portion of the computer is much more important than the GPU portion. The GPU portion requires much less hardware than the CPU portion does, and thus in case of compatibility problems having the CPU render the game as well as run it is a superior option than trying to figure out why a 2003 game doesn't like working with seemingly random graphics cards.

When I'm scrolling around, adjusting the zoom (takes around 10-40 seconds to zoom out/in and to fully render), switching from ground to underground view (takes about 3-4 minutes), switching from subway tunnel building to subway station building (despite being in the same view, 3-5 minutes to load), it lags very badly on my ATI Mobility 5730 graphic card. Maybe its because of the graphic card's driver.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

When I'm scrolling around, adjusting the zoom (takes around 10-40 seconds to zoom out/in and to fully render), switching from ground to underground view (takes about 3-4 minutes), switching from subway tunnel building to subway station building (despite being in the same view, 3-5 minutes to load), it lags very badly on my ATI Mobility 5730 graphic card. Maybe its because of the graphic card's driver.

And what happens when you run in software rendering?

My ATI GPU is OK, but the background software package won't allow more than one back buffer, and the graphics get scrambled after a while. More back buffers would solve this, but the OS guys do not have this as a priority. I can run hardware rendering on a small city or one I've just started, but I have to switch to software when the buffering screws up the graphics. The only difference I notice is that the GPU graphics are cleaner. Overall, the operating rate seems to be about the same.

Make sure you have the latest drivers, or failing that, delete all your drivers and let windows find the one it likes the taste of.

[Coretz 19]

For some reason software rendering increases performance, but also decreases the GFX.

I really wish there were some way for Sim City to multithread, even if just the plugins (like NAM) could be on a separate thread. What makes me unhappiest is that even though I've got a quad core 3.3 GHz, only 1/4th of it is used, and even I lag.

Windows XP Pro x64

Intel Core i5-2500K (maybe I should overclock it)

2x4GB RAM

nVidia GTX 550 Ti

Western Digital Enterprise 1TB hard drive

One would think my computer is overkill...

[Loney 22]

I'm wondering why you're using Window XP on such hardware. It supports up to DirectX 9 but your GPU supports up to DirectX 11. I also read several reviews that pointed out that Window 7 runs faster on modern hardware than XP due to superior optimization, though XP obviously runs better on older hardware as it's less demanding. Though I can understand why if you have a Window XP installation CD around and find Window 7 too expensive.

Nevertheless, SC4 will only use one core while eating up resource insanely, and that will often be the bottleneck for gaming computers. I'm fairly sure if SC4 supported more than four cores and larger city tiles (more traffic simulating), it would make Crysis seem like a resource light game.

  Edited July 10, 2011 by Loney  

[Jazzmaster 716]

It would be awesome if EA just updated this game to work with modern hardware. Lag is one thing, and even the fastest computers have trouble with some games (Metro 2033 and Crysis come to mind). But the inability to at least SUPPORT modern video cards and CPUs is really too bad, because other than hyper load times you get nothing optimal out of SimCity 4 on modern hardware.

For your command line, adding these two things

-w Lets you run in windowed mode. On faster machines, the ability to multitask with SimCity 4 without eating up all your system resources is nice (at least you can listen to music or something).

-CustomResolution:enabled -rXXXxXXXx32 This will make the game run on a custom resolution. Make sure it is one compatible with your display (1600x900 for me) or it won't work.

-intro:Off Turns off the intro, which really brings down load time.

-CPUCount:2 I'm not entirely sure if the 2 means 2 virtual cores (1 core can do two tasks at once) or two 'physical' cores but it seems to help, if even by a bit...

-EH:off This one is a mystery to me..no idea what it is but I found it on a thread on the Steam forums for SimCity 4. It seems to do wonders for modern CPUs, however.

[simcity4deluxe 95]

I could play Crysis on max settings and be fine, and this game.

[z1 566]

-CPUCount:2 I'm not entirely sure if the 2 means 2 virtual cores (1 core can do two tasks at once) or two 'physical' cores but it seems to help, if even by a bit...

-EH:off This one is a mystery to me..no idea what it is but I found it on a thread on the Steam forums for SimCity 4. It seems to do wonders for modern CPUs, however.

It's virtual. The number can be anywhere from one to the total number of your virtual cores; this switch just has to be present if you have anything more than a single-core system. It doesn't really improve performance, as you can still never use more than the equivalent of one core, but it does spread out the work over the number of cores you specify, sometimes in interesting ways.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

@z1: I don't use the core selection option and my game runs fine on my Athlon X2 (Dual core). Is this a windows peculiarity? I am running Linux. In fact, with the latest fixes to my graphics driver and the wine beta 1.3.23 with windows 2008 R2 decor, it runs naked with only the intro:off option. I run in software rendering because of a limitation in wine, which has trouble allocating more than one back buffer for the GPU.

[z1 566]

@z1: I don't use the core selection option and my game runs fine on my Athlon X2 (Dual core). Is this a windows peculiarity?

It could very well be. In Windows though, it's pretty much a necessity if you have a multi-core system. (Unless you go about setting the affinity manually each time you run the game, of course. But that's really unnecessary.)

[Silur 3,304]

This is my favorite game for ever, but very old game created 2001-2002 !!!

And what we must want ????

2011 - today !!!

There are many garbage objects in SimCity_1-5 files.

We know about it - but we like SC4 more than 7 years ...

This game can live today only with SIMTROPOLIS, SC DEVOTION, SIM PEGASUS - etc...

with EXCELLENT BAT'ers...

  Edited July 10, 2011 by Silur  

[Loney 22]

The question is, will SC4 continue to be compatible with newer hardware? I can imagine in the future where CPUs' and GPUs' architectures as combined, greatly increasing the amount of cores and processing power, at the cost of each individual cores' processing power. Suddenly, the game feels like it's being run on the bare minimal system requirements when only one of the 128-2048 cores are being used.

[z1 566]

You're not going to see home PCs with hundreds or thousands of identical cores. Most programs are much too serial in nature to take advantage of anywhere near that amount of parallelism, even in theory.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You're not going to see home PCs with hundreds or thousands of identical cores. Most programs are much too serial in nature to take advantage of anywhere near that amount of parallelism, even in theory.

Amen.

What do users do with four cores now? How many programs are there around with even that much parallelism that works properly.

Forking off a child process means that an identical copy of the spawning process is made, probably with some switch set to tell the child is is now the "blart" part of the process. The complications this introduces like task synchronization and critical section control as well as interprocess communication (my system has about four of these to choose from), makes this an exponentially harder program to write and debug. A better option would be to make full use of the GPU. It sounds simple, but so does string theory.

[Loney 22]

You're not going to see home PCs with hundreds or thousands of identical cores. Most programs are much too serial in nature to take advantage of anywhere near that amount of parallelism, even in theory.

20 years ago, dual core processors were unheard of. 20 years ago, the ability to use multiple GPUs was unheard of. 20 years ago, the usage of GPUs to crunch massive calculations was unheard of.

20 years from now, someone is going to figure out how to fuse a GPU with a CPU.

  Edited July 12, 2011 by Loney