Massive Graphics corruption and pos solution

[morpheus2n2 2]

I to get this problem with the corrupt graphics that I see a lot of people posting about but mine is at an insane level, after much testing I have found the part of the problem and a possible solution.

Ok testing.

I tested on my old system and my new system and this is what I found and have concluded.

Old system

Asus Striker Extreme, 680i Chipset

Core 2 Due E6400

XFX 8800 GTX

Windows 7 Home prem x64

On this system I could run the game fine with all my plugins in hardware mode with no problems of any sort As seen from my screen shots here, The game would run for hours with no problems at all not even a crash!

New System

EVGA SLi 3, X58 Chipset

Intel i7 950

Same Graphics card

Windows home Prem x64

Now on this system I get massive corruption https://picasaweb.go...feat=directlink and random crashing with the same plugins.

But if I set the Affinity of the game to use just CPU 0 the game runs better with very little graphics corruption and no crashing.

I see a lot of people saying that its all to do with modern GPU well thats only part of the problem as you can see its also modern CPU's namely any CPU with more than 2 cores!!

I am wondering if anyone else is able confirm this at all, and if this is something that can be fixed with a simple hack/mod???

Now I did say this is what I have found and in my case it seems to fix 98% of the problem as I still get the odd graphics glitch here and there but it fixes itself in a matter of sec's where as when I had massive corruption the only way to fix was ALT+TAB'ing in and out of the game as this would force the game to do a full re-render.

  Edited April 4, 2011 by morpheus2n2  

[north country dude 202]

I see a lot of people saying that its all to do with modern GPU well thats only part of the problem as you can see its also modern CPU's namely any CPU with more than 2 cores!!

I am wondering if anyone else is able confirm this at all, and if this is something that can be fixed with a simple hack/mod???

Sim City 4 was originally released on January 14, 2003. At that time there were few, if any, multicore CPU based systems commercially available to the public. Hence, the Sim City 4 executable was designed to run as a single process. It can not be divided into smaller processes able to be run on multiple CPU's.

While many people have reported little or no problems running Sim City 4 on their multicore based systems, many have set their processor affinity for SC4.exe to run as a single core CPU.

Further discussions about this issue can be found here:

Freeze, Crash To Desktop (CTD), Dual Core? Quick guide to solve these problems.

What does ~e5d151.tmp do for the simcity executable? In my system, it is waiting on a pipe (in the windows interpreter)

Discussions about GPU performance can be found here:

Software or Hardware? Which is the best renderer and why?

[morpheus2n2 2]

I see a lot of people saying that its all to do with modern GPU well thats only part of the problem as you can see its also modern CPU's namely any CPU with more than 2 cores!!

I am wondering if anyone else is able confirm this at all, and if this is something that can be fixed with a simple hack/mod???

Sim City 4 was originally released on January 14, 2003. At that time there were few, if any, multicore CPU based systems commercially available to the public. Hence, the Sim City 4 executable was designed to run as a single process. It can not be divided into smaller processes able to be run on multiple CPU's.

While many people have reported little or no problems running Sim City 4 on their multicore based systems, many have set their processor affinity for SC4.exe to run as a single core CPU.

Further discussions about this issue can be found here:

Freeze, Crash To Desktop (CTD), Dual Core? Quick guide to solve these problems.

What does ~e5d151.tmp do for the simcity executable? In my system, it is waiting on a pipe (in the windows interpreter)

Discussions about GPU performance can be found here:

Software or Hardware? Which is the best renderer and why?

Cool never knew about the command line settings, I know there a lots of post about this issue but most of them don't have helpful replys like yours, most if not all have replys with others saying they got same prob but can't fix it or they just dont have a reply at all

Ok have done some more digging and noticed that one of the links you sent didn't cover the Nvida control panel enough and was written on and old driver set,

I Have set the following settings with good results,

Anisotropic filtering 16x

Antialiasing - Gamma correction off

Antialiasing - Mode off

Antialiasing - Setting None

Antialiasing - Transparency off

CUDA - GPUs All

Maximum pre-rendered frames 8

Multi-display/mixed-GPU Acceleration Single display performance mode

Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization on

Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias Allow

Texture filtering - Quality High quality

Texture filtering - Trilnear optimization on

Threaded optimization on

Triple buffering on

Texture filtering - Anisoptropic filter optimization off

Vertical sync Force on

From what I have found you can set this how you like but the one that makes a difference is the pre-rendered frames option as this is allowing the game to correct itself before the corrupt frame hits the monitor so you still get the glitches but they don't last as long and are not as bad as where before.

I will continue to play around with the settings and options to see if this can be ether fixed or 99% working

  Edited April 4, 2011 by morpheus2n2  

[Dukman 0]

First of all, I'm glad I found this thread.

I am/was having the exact same issues as the OP. (Quad Core here) I couldn't decide if the graphic glitches/artifacts were related to hardware or software. Usually Win7's compatibility mode does a pretty good job, but not always. This was actually the first definitive solution I have run across in my research into solving the problem.

Setting the CPU affinity drastically reduces the glitching in the game. But setting affinity can be a bit of a pain to, because you have to set it manually everytime you want to play the game. So I went looking for a program that would set the affinity for me so that I didn't have to open up the task manager everytime I started the game.

What I found is this.

http://edgemeal.110mb.com/PriFinitty/index.htm

PriFinitty allows you to set up a profile that will automatically set the affinity for you. I'm still test driving the program, so I can't give a full yay or nay report yet. But so far, so good.

[Loney 22]

Here's a line of code that can be inserted in SC4's shortcut so that SC4 will always run on a single core:

-CPUCount:1 -CPUPriority:high

  Edited April 16, 2011 by Loney  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Here's a line of code that can be inserted in SC4's shortcut so that SC4 will always run on a single core:

-CPUCount:1 -CPUPriority:high

I wonder if you have a multi-processor if you really need to up the priority of a program when it has a CPU to itself. I am sure that this program has more timer run outs than I/O waits unless you are paging heavily,.