The Best PC

[wmc78 1]

what is the best pc to play sim city 4? overs the years of playing sim city 4 i have always had the same pc, sure its crashed a few times and I had to start all over again. I have a single core 2.4ghz 2 gig of ram and 1gig ati graphics card running on xp, soon I will have to get a more up to date pc. I have heard that sim city dosent like dual core, so is sim city 4 only ever going to run on single core? If I get a new quad core pc will it be worse than playing it on a single core.

Many thanks

[Durfsurn 539]

if you get a quad core you can change how many cores sim city uses by going in task manger while sim city is open and right clicking on sc4. the set the affinity to cpu 1 only. that should work

[riccan 10]

I have read from time-to-time about problems running SC4 on multi-core machines. I have a AMD dual-core desktop and a laptop with Intel i7 quad core. I've never had crash issues on either machine.

[Hamish 1,370]

Moving this to SC4 - Bugs and Technical, since it is a technical question about SimCity 4, rather than the new SimCity 2013.

[jrm541992 17]

Since SC4 is was only designed for singles core machines, it will only run stable if it's processor affinity was set to run on one core. The game will also run slower than usual than if it was being run on a single core machine. Dual cores usually split the processing power in half, Quad cores usually divide the processing power by four for those cores; say if a quad core CPU was clocked @ 2.7 Ghz, each core will be clocked at about 675 Mhz.

[GMT 389]

say if a quad core CPU was clocked @ 2.7 Ghz, each core will be clocked at about 675 Mhz.

not quite right. you do the common mistake here, but the other way around.

the common mistake is that many ppl think a quad core @ 2.7ghz has the power of 2.7ghz x4 = 10.8ghz which is utterly wrong.

you take it the other way around and say a quad core @ 2.7ghz has the power of 675mhz x4 = 2.7ghz which is also wrong.

multicore cpu never run "in line" like the above calcs suggest, but "parallel", so each core has the stated ghz (2.7ghz in your case) and with the correct system and software architecture can either designate certain applications to certain processors or even certain tasks within a single application to certain processors.

3D movie tools, for example, are mostly designed to appreciate several cores to divide the calcultation tasks thus speeding up the process of rendering frames. same for several games that are optimized for dual/quad core systems.

it is, after all, a difference if the whole calculation process is done by one core or divided into parts and done by several cores.

if you want, think of cloud computing like folding@home and seti@home, they cut one workload into several parts and let them run on several pcs to dramatically speed up the evaluation work done; analog to what multicore optimized programs do.

that said, sim city 4 which is a single core game - if at all - will only benefit from multicore processors in a way that background processing of other applications aswell as the operating system does not affect the sim city 4 cuz it's done on different cores.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Our meridian based friend is completely correct. SC4 is single threaded and cannot ever use more than one core at the same time. All a multi-core machine does is give you more processors to run other stuff while the game exhausts its time-slice. Confining the game to a single core within the operating system (-cpucount:1) merely changes the dispatch algorithm in the O/S to send the game to only one processor and not consider it for multi-tasking, which the game can't do, anyway. The result is a better scheduling algorithm in the O/S, and makes no never mind to the game.

Multi-core crashes are generally due to undocumented features in the O/S dispatcher. It is surprising that you don't get BSODs when this happens. BTW, I've never had a "kernel panic" in nearly eight years of running Linux. Operating systems are easy to write it you don't get all incestuous with your application shop.

[aereus 106]

As others have said, if you are that concerned with crashing after you get a multi-core system, just set the processor affinity on SC4 after running it. Or it should be possible to make a launch shortcut that automatically sets the affinity. Otherwise I don't think there should be any problems even if you don't.

A multi-core CPU is essentially multiple CPUs. The clockspeed you read is what all of them will run at. (Unless you have some sort of built-in turbo mode which can then actually turn down 2 of the cores in order to turn up the other two for more speed while keeping the same heat level.)

As far as what to buy if you wanted to upgrade your PC, it would depend on your budget, what your current power supply wattage is, etc.

[GMT 389]

yep, like nonny moose already said, add -cpucount:1 to the adressline of your shortcut and voila, your game won't run into any of the multicore issues anymore.

what further helps with stability of the game on newer pcs is working with a costum profile for sim city 4 in your graphics card control panel.

I don't know about ati cards, but here's a list of things that extremely help with stability on nvidia cards, and I guess you can apply similar things on current ati cards.

Anisotopic Filtering: Off

All Antialiasing Options: Off

Maximum pre-rendered frames: 0 (Leaving this at the suggested 3 caused me issues)

Multi-dispay/Mixed GPU acceleration: Single Display Performance mode (I have dual monitors so forcing this to singe helped)

Texture Filtering - Anisotropic: Off

Texture Filtering - Negative LOD Bias: Clamp (This setting was also causing issues)

Texture Filtering - Quality: High Quality

Texture Filtering - Trilinear Optimization: On

Threaded Optimization: On

Triple Buffering: Off (This was an absolute requirement to have off)

Veritcal Sync: Force Off (This was also an absolute requirement to have turned off)

note that not all options are available anymore with never nvidia drivers, but those still available do the trick aswell.

for upgrading your pc, like areus said, it's a matter of budget. from a few 100 bucks to 5 digits everything is possible.

but since you have a pc about as "bad" as my pc was when I replaced it 09 after 8 years of dutiful service, I suggest you to completely discard the update idea and really go down and by a whole new pc, because upgrading will not work anymore for changed standards (almost all connection types have changed since then), so you gotta replace everything anyways, which should not be done unless you have at least basic knowledge considering hardware.

I know what I'm talking about, my first try at assembling a custom pc ended up with the techshop guy laughing his behind off for I pretty much tried to built the most incompatible system ever created by mankind... lucky me he was in for customer service and refused to accept the order, otherwise I would've spent loads of money for nothing.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

If we are talking desktop, it should be fairly easy to just replace your main box with one having processors, main disks, keyboard and mouse. The keyboard and mouse are generally bundled with any box, and are really throw away items. Then be sure you have enough of the right kind of ports for your peripherals. Try to avoid getting stuck with Windows 8.

[wtrtwnguy 3]

If your computer is as old as SimCity4, then there is probably no way to upgrade it short of replacing everything but the computer case. Supposedly, if you can run The Sims 3, you should be able to run SimCity 2013, so the system requirements won't be particularly high. I replaced my old single core Pentium 4 Prescott with a quad core Phenom 2 & SimCity 4 runs flawlessly. In fact, it runs better on my newer computer than on my old one, so no worries there.