SimCity Beta: Graphics and Performance

[landstander248 8]

Putting aside other concerns for a minute, I wanted to see how people feel about the graphics and performance of the SimCity demo.

I run a Core i5 with 8 GB RAM, but my video card is a 5-year-old, overclocked Radeon 4870 with 512MB. I use a 10000rpm HDD, no SSD yet.

By default, the game settings were at minimum and the game looked awful. Now, I have all settings up to High on 1600x1280 with 30FPS and the game runs almost flawlessly. I can barely believe that such an old card could support this game so easily.

Considering that I'm playing on High, I'm not overly impressed with the graphics. Presumably, a more modern card would have additional graphical features enabled that I'm missing. But as it looks to me now, the textures are unimpressive and the in particular the terrain (city and region) is severely lacking. Personally, I find that putting the tilt shift on high makes the game look better. And be sure to zoom around, as the game looks significantly better from angles of only partial light.

What systems are other people running and what is your experience? And what do you think of the graphics at the settings you're using?

[Moofers 10]

I've tried the game on two systems my Desktop PC Custom Built:

AMD Phenom II X4 - 3GHz

4GB Ram

Nvidia GTX580 1.5GB - Factory Overclocked

Win 7 x64

And I've enabled everything to the highest and it runs smoothly and beautifully.

--

Now as decided to go on holiday I had to start using my laptop which is a Sony Custom Built.

Intel Core i3

4GB Ram

AMD Radeon HD 7650M 1GB

Windows 7 x64

Which runs on Medium Settings and AA enabled, it runs okay but following cars is a nightmare of a horror show, but so far it runs quite well.

[Securion 3]

Runs perfect on our three machines here at home. Even when cities are fully built.

1. AMD quad core, 4gb ram, 6950 1gb.

2. AMD quad core, 2gb ram, 5770 1gb.

3. Intel dual core, 2gb ram, 3850 512mb.

[Hoipus 292]

One thing I do like about the graphics is that if someone were to mod in a bunch of LEGO buildings to replace all of the default buildings, it would not look out of place at all. I do not mean this in any negative way, because I'd love to see it happen.

[poshbakerloo 186]

I have been pretty impressed by how smooth it runs, although the graphics are a bit 'Sims 3 ish'. Good, but cartoon like and not that detailed.

My 5 year old laptop...

AMD Turion 64 x2 2.2Ghz

4Gb RAM

128Mb GeForce 8400M GS

17" Screen at 1440x900

and it runs fine at 1440x900, textures high, shadows off though.

[flyer2359 92]

My 2.5 year old laptop:

Core i7 1.6ghz 720QM 4-cores

1GB DDR3 Nvidia 230m GT

4GB DDR3 Ram

Can only run on medium at about 20 fps .

[guitarmatt99 27]

I can run everything on low and shadows off with little lag (sigh)

Dell Inspiron 531

DDR2 4GB of Ram

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 5000+ 2.60GHz

ATI Redeon HD 2400 Pro

Can anyone suggest a graphics card for under £50 so I can run on medium (with AA)?

[Techleo 18]

Ran the game on my desktop:

AMD Phenom II 720 Black Edition,

4gb ddr3

512mb ATI 4870 OC

No lag, graphical errors or hiccups at the highest settings. Even with anti-aliasing on. I did notice with the Warmer filter that it ran a tiny bit faster then with the Vibrant.

Also its worth noting I ran it with the Framerate locked at 60fps.

[ZrC 3]

I can run everything on low and shadows off with little lag (sigh)

Dell Inspiron 531

DDR2 4GB of Ram

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 5000+ 2.60GHz

ATI Redeon HD 2400 Pro

Can anyone suggest a graphics card for under £50 so I can run on medium (with AA)?

AMD 6670

My 2.5 year old laptop:

Core i7 1.6ghz 720QM 4-cores

1GB DDR3 Nvidia 230m GT

4GB DDR3 Ram

Can only run on medium at about 20 fps .

Looks like your video card is holding you back. Try turning off AA and shadows.

[jedrek18 1]

The game runs great on my laptop with Core i5 3360M, AMD FirePro M4000 and 4GB of ram (1920x1080, all settings set to high).

[Howitzer Zak 17]

I have an i5 - 3570K CPU with 16 gigs of RAM (not that it was using it), and a 560ti video card.  I was able to put everything on max settings including AA while recording my playtime at 1920x1200.  Didn't check my framerate, but I didn't notice any perceivable video lag at all.

[ZrC 3]

The game is very easy on hardware unless you ramp up the shadows/AA or have a high resolution monitor. I ran with a 30fps cap since nothing more is really needed for a simulation game and never seen the cpu usage go above 15-25% with a maxed city.

[soldyne 111]

I have the following:

460GTX Nvidia card

8 GB RAM

AMD II X4 3.2 GHz

Win 7 64 bit

 

I first tried to run it on Ultra settings but, I got some stutter.  I turned Shadows down to medium and got a fairly smooth 35 FPS.  Shadows are the biggest killer for FPS in my experience.

[warrior 169]

I've played on low on my PC and highest on my laptop (which is much more powerful than my ancient desktop) and when I made the lighting setting the same on both computers they looked pretty much identical. I could see no affect of changing the other settings, both in terms of performance and quality.

 

Putting the lighting on anything other than min, made the desktop choke when scrolling and created an extremely annoying blurring effect (I assume this is motion blue) when scrolling, points would streak. In almost the exact same way on TV shows like Star Trek when a ship went into warp the stars (points) would streak into lines.

 

This also happened on my laptop but wasn't as annoying. But the effect was off putting and I wish i could have disabled it without lowering the settings. So my laptop could handle lighting on High and only started lagging when I out it on Ultra, but I played with it more on Min because the motion blur was intensely irritating.