Still heavy lagg?

[Viking4243 0]

Hello,

 

I'm new here, i saw lots of your posts with beautifull cities and i wanted to give sim4 a try again with mods! 

I'm not so attracted by sim5 as the city zone seems much too small for me

 

Now my questions, 

I run a I7 2.4ghz, 12gb ram, 64bit win8, SSD disk, and a GTX 680M with 4gig 

I somehow would have expected that this schould be sufficient for a 2003 game!!!

Well no! it laggs like hell!

 

I'm playing full options ion SC4, 1080*1200

 

What am i missing? is there an option wich should never be turned on?

 

thanks

 

[GMT 389]

this question has been asked a bazillion times already, guess we should really make a sticky out of such faqs.

 

the problem is that the game runs so many calculations the bigger the city gets, but is stuck in the 32bit world there was 10 years ago, so no matter how powerful your system is, sim city will take it to it's knees.

it can't work with more than 4gb ram due to it's 32bit design and multiprocessing was a thing of the future back then, thus having no support for multicore systems.

 

the better your cpu is, the better the game runs but only on one core and the othes fall asleep idling around... sort of.

the more ram isn't that much of a solution cuz the game can't handle more than 32bit adresses

fast hdd/ssd help a lot with loading times but not with the simulation itself.

 

if EA was a cool publisher one might have a chance to expect some anniversary patch that might help with that, but... lol... EA...

 

soooo, long story short, embrace the lag as part of your sim city destiny.

also, browse the technical issues threads, there's a couple of threads that give you some advice on what you can do to stabilize gameplay, but don't expect mirracles

[Viking4243 0]

Thanks a lot, puting Software rendering also helps but it seems not comaptible with all mods!

[Cefien 361]

When you installed mods that required Hardware rendering, then you have no choice but to accept the lag.

My system run in 3.0ghz, but even that doesn't help much when the city grows bigger, so...i learn to live with this.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

The only possible help would be to upgrade the program to modern state.  This would require it to become abandonware with a source code release.  From EA?  Don't hold your breath.

[SilverCyric 131]

Well, I came across a thread and Haljackey was talking about the 4GB patch program that allocates memory just for SC4 and have had a few others claim it works great, anybody else tried it yet?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Worth a try, I suppose.  However, you have probably run out of CPU cycles and more memory won't help that.

 

The best way to find out if something works is to ask your computer.

[SilverCyric 131]

Oh I have many times, why oh why are you doing this?? But it still just sits there and just hums... I think it's mocking me!!

Anyways, yeah, I've looked over the exception reports, even had you Moose look at one, it's just run of the mill CTD's. But since I installed new NAM, it's just really touchy and I've kept your advice forefront. Saving often, like very 5 minutes, makes a big difference, but eventually, the simulation will catch as I did a spin, a zoom just right to trip the bug. Exiting to region seems to be an almost guaranteed CTD with large tiles and about a 1/8 chance on medium tiles. And I've never gotten this before NAM 31, but the game will simply just hang. Gets stuck in the middle of saving mostly, the music starts looping, and I have to pull up a task manager and end the process. I would never complain or blame the NAM team, they're work is superb, but I'm anxious to try 31.1 to see if maybe it'll run just a tad smoother, like 30. Somedays, I get nearly 2 dozen crashes. Sometimes, it's just like oh well, reboot, but other times, it can get frustrating, having to reboot 3 times in 20 minutes. It gets especially bad once I have a large tile about half way covered. I've tried medium tiles, but run out of space too quick to get any stage 9+ growth.

Just looking for directions to start looking at getting better performance, I do thank you  sir! : )

[Kiiroitori 55]

Hm, have you tried the I don't if it'll help but apparently it helps with stability issues and has the "Ability to change the number of Logical Cores used. (Auto-Detected)."  Which could speed things up perhaps although i maybe wrong. Its worth a try though.

As for the NAM 31 Issue, I'm clearly not an NAM expert but I know there are stability issues with NAM 31 running on i7 core processors, hence the crashing.  But they did say they would fix it in NAM 31.1, if I'm wrong.  

EDIT: Linked to SC4 Launcher 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

It seems the crash on close problem extends to more than i7 CPUs.  I get them with V31 on my Athlon X2's.  I am testing a fix, but it is too soon to tell whether it works.

[KradenX 0]

I was told either deal with the crashes or revert to 30. I reverted to NAM 30 and 99% of my crashes stopped.

 

As to the original question, hardware can only run the software as well as the software is written. You can't put a race car driver in a pinto and expect it to run 200 mph, just as you can't put a blind grandma in a race car and not expect a crash.

 

[MandelSoft 2,775]

Crashes with the NAM 31 have been heard quite a lot of times and we have been reducing the controller size for the NAM 31.1. So far, testing the new, smaller controller has indeed reduced crashes of this kind (yes, we have approached some of the people experiencing crashes with the NAM 31, since it didn't happen at any of the other NAM members. So far, good results). The question is when the new NAM is eady for release, and since these kind of problems being reported, we do our darnest best to get it ready as soon as possible.

 

As for the original question. SimCity 4 is limited by allocating only 4GB of RAM (due to its 32-bit architecture) and one a single core (since multi-cores were rare back in 2003). What does help making your game faster is turning the shadows off and optionally set city details to low. This might look not that good, but the game runs fast, crashes less and saves and loads faster.

 

Best,

Maarten

[SilverCyric 131]

...

Whoops, had a reply, messed it up in edit... D'Oh!!

Ok, what I was trying to say is that I specifically said I would never blame the NAM team. I don't want to sound like a complainer because despite the increased CTD's, I think this new NAM is phenomenal!! I refuse to revert to 30, I tried for about 5 minutes and was so disheartened it's not even funny, hehehe. I know I'm a loon...

Anyways, the SC4 Launcher is redundant for me, great idea and its very helpful, but I already have a custom shortcut I've been using for years

But I've been following multiple threads both here and at SC4D and our biggest concern is making sure we don't have a custom shortcut, or maybe a lot that isn't compatible. I'm sure their will be a number of lots needing to be upgraded now, maybe not, I have been wrong before... : )

[SilverCyric 131]

Crashes with the NAM 31 have been heard quite a lot of times and we have been reducing the controller size for the NAM 31.1. So far, testing the new, smaller controller has indeed reduced crashes of this kind (yes, we have approached some of the people experiencing crashes with the NAM 31, since it didn't happen at any of the other NAM members. So far, good results). The question is when the new NAM is eady for release, and since these kind of problems being reported, we do our darnest best to get it ready as soon as possible.

 

As for the original question. SimCity 4 is limited by allocating only 4GB of RAM (due to its 32-bit architecture) and one a single core (since multi-cores were rare back in 2003). What does help making your game faster is turning the shadows off and optionally set city details to low. This might look not that good, but the game runs fast, crashes less and saves and loads faster.

 

Best,

Maarten

I've been reading a bunch on this recently, please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the game only allocate 2 GB of memory at most, and requires the 4GB patch to the exe to allocate more memory, this will allow the game to run much smoother I've read... It's not supposed to actually solve issues, but definitely allows the game to run longer and more stable

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Well, let's see.  I just started the game and loaded one of my biggest cites (around 250K Sims on a large tile)  System monitor says I am running 96% CPU with 1.1GB of allocated memory with 3.4GB of virtual being earmarked.  This game doesn't swap.  I have 3.5GB of user RAM.  This process (firefox) is running 317.4MB using around 4% of the second processor which is also busy running the system monitor.

 

I have something around 1.1GB of plugins, and the loading time has slowed down considerably with the new NAM V31l.  I can now make a sandwich while the program loads, and even find something to drink.  City loads are correspondingly slower.  However, being retired, I can stand some idle time.

 

And yes, I am running Linux and have four desktops. Each of the processes discussed here is running in its own desktop, so monitoring is easy for me.