Would sc4 run good on a HP Pavilion G6?

[Invaderrjl123 31]

i want to know if i can install my hp pavilion g6, it is new and it it seems fast, but im not sure a game like Simcity 4 Deluxe Edition with mods can handle playing on this comp, please reply.

[JamesBond276 1]

From my experience, it doesn't need much. If you find it choppy, switch to hardware rendering.

[chimeran 208]

considering that SC4 is an old game, a g6 should handle it fairly easy. the biggest drawbacks are the i3 processor and the graphics chipset. playing vanilla will be no problem but depending on the number of your mods and the dependencies that use higher texture quality can cause lag in the game. i have yet to play SC4 on my new laptop but my old one had 2nd gen i7 processors w/6 GB of RAM and with 4 GB of mods the lag became noticeable.

[GMT 389]

considering that SC4 is an old game, a g6 should handle it fairly easy. the biggest drawbacks are the i3 processor and the graphics chipset. playing vanilla will be no problem but depending on the number of your mods and the dependencies that use higher texture quality can cause lag in the game. i have yet to play SC4 on my new laptop but my old one had 2nd gen i7 processors w/6 GB of RAM and with 4 GB of mods the lag became noticeable.

how can an i3 processor be the drawback for a game that was released 2003, when we still had to cope with single core pentium?

besides the game's coding itself, from a nowadays perspective, the main problems come from the facts that the game can handle only one processor and runs on a 32bit architecture.

so, long story short, your i7 with 6gb ram does only make little difference playing sim city 4 when compared to a latest generation pentium 4 with 4gb ram. sad but true.

of course, a 3,5ghz multicore has an advantage over a 2.5ghz singlecore, but only such as that the one core sim city hogs at is more powerfull.

the 64bit only helps a little as it frees a handfull of mb for the game that were previously used otherwise, but you won't get beyond that limitation.

the size of the swap-file also has some impact on the performance, because that's how bigger ram needs were handled back in the days of 32bit.

further, sim city 4 goes VERY easy on your graphics card, so the g6 graphics card isn't much of a problem either.

the only real 3d object is the terrain and some of the props, aswell as the udi vehicles. the buildings are more or less simple boxes with an alpha-blended texture on them, the fixed viepoints make it possible to fake a 3d impression with this technique.

in fact, you can run the game with software accelerated graphics and it might happen that this solves more problems than hardware acceleration creates when playing the game... so again, the difference between, say, a geforce 6xx series and a geforce fx series graphics card are very little.

the amount of mods tho is in fact a big bugger when it comes to performance of the game. ever was, ever will be.

keep your plugins folders (there's 2 of them) nice and tidy, only put there what you actually need. the game always loads all mods placed there, no matter if you use them or not.

I have different "profiles" for different regions I play. I used to handle this with the sc4 startup manager but somehow ran into more and more problems with the program and abandonned it so now, I have these profiles as pluginfolders I activate/deactivate by naming them. cloggs up some hdd space but I won't run out so soon so I don't care.

has the benefit that the game only loads what I need for the respective region even tho my plugin list is much longer.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

The only problem you might have with a new machine is that this game requires a little TLC and perhaps more computer knowledge than you have. As a minimum you need to be able to manipulate the file system (windows explorer), and perhaps handle a console (command line).

It is also good if you understand how downloading and plugins are actually separate operations. You need to maintain your downloads on their own, and only put things in Plugins that belong there.

It is also useful if you understand the minimum syntax of the command line (target line in the shortcut). Beyond that, fancy hardware is irrelevant.