OpenGL & slow city loading

[Nique 291]

When i choose OpenGL for rendering i get this:

 

Also, whatever renderer i choose, city loading is kinda slow while in the past cities loaded very very quickly. Is there some 'known' problem (maybe NAM?) with this? I have a 64bit 4.2Ghz quad core processor...

[Thunderman 30]

Have you tried to set the option to "software"? maybe it helps...

If it helps it might be a faulty lot/bat etc or maybe your videocard is getting overheated or "old" ?

 

Do you have any problems with your videocard while trying out other games?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Sorry to say, but the OpenGL section doesn't work.  I think working on UDI got in the way.

[Nique 291]

Yea, i have a 9600 HD ATI card. Pretty new GPU. I just wanted to test the openGL and wondered why the graphical assets weren't loading properly (because that's what it looks like).

But the slow loading process for a city is weird to me. Without NAM a huge city loads within a few seconds. Now it takes like a minute.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

NAM has a large number of textures that have to be loaded for each place you have any network.  Somehow I think this is a drawback not only to loading, but might adversely affect both zooming and scrolling as well.

 

I have environments with both NAM v30 and NAM v31.  The new edition is much larger, and I believe it has slowed my loading somewhat.

 

Make sure your disk is defragmented.  You should do it weekly.

[Nique 291]

Thanks for your tip. I have an solid state disk so i don't need to defragmentize it. The disk (why is it still called a disk...?) is really fast but it still takes 1 minute.. I used the DAT packer but didn't help increasing the loading speed. Wish there was another way. Well that's it then. Thanks.

[libellibicus 396]

I have a quite prehistoric PC (3.2 ghz single core with 2gb RAM) so slow loading of my cities is a fact of life for me. From launching the game to actually being able to do anything in my cities usually takes about 10 mins. That's enough time for me to make a cuppa and have a ciggy, before I get down to the serious business of city building. Roll on winning the National Lottery, then maybe I can get a comp that can load a city in about 5 mins.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

@Nique:  If your SSD is formatted in NTFS, you still have the fragmentation problem and if it is used for other programs, you might still be accumulating junk from ill-behaved apps.  It might be worth a look to see if it is fragmented.  The O/S still thinks it is a disk.

[Tom Duhamel 1]

Nonny Moose: Never EVER tell anyone to defragment an SSD. Just like Nique says, it's not even a disk. Normally, Win7 will recognize that it's an SSD and will disable Defrag, but in any case defragmenting an SSD will ruin it.

 

By it's very nature, an SSD is ALWAYS fragmented and it must remain so.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Sorry about that, I don't have one.  Now, how is fragmentation eliminated/reduced on an SSD?  If it is under the control of NTFS, there may well be problems.

[moaku 74]

A Nonny Moose: You don't eliminate / reduce fragmentation on an ssd... Due to the simple fact that it doesn't matter if it's fragmented. The way it accesses data, it will have the SAME performances if a file is continuous on it or if it's sparse accross the whole disk in thousands of fragments.

 

An SSD is basically flash memory, and every single node (aka "fragments") on it has an address, and a fixed size, just like a normal disk...

A normal disk works better if the files is continuous because it reads it on the disk, so if it's fragmented, it would have to look at different places of the disk, making the disk seeking to the position where it needs to read.

On an ssd, you have no "disk" rotating, you don't need to seek the heads to where the datas are to read them. You got an address for each fragment, and it reads what it contains. Be it continuous or splitted will not matter nor impact on the performences.

Defragmenting an ssd will just reduce it's lifespan. SSDs are flash memory, and flash memory have a limited (even if high nowadays) number of "writing cycles". When you defragment, you basically move some data (so read it at an address, writing it on another) on it when it's not needed, so you'll comsume some of the "remaining writing cycles".

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Thanks.  One tends to forget there's no latency to speak of, even if there are several reads to get one thing done.

[moaku 74]

And don't forget an hdd usually have no more than 16 heads to access the disks, so it can only in best case situations read 16 sectors at the same time, while an ssd can read about 10k sectors at the same time.

So, there are reasons for the pricing differencies between hdds and ssds

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

So you must have to have a really hot channel and DMA to use one of those beasts.  I wonder why anyone would spend that kind of money just to run games?  Surely it is got for a business reason?

[jdenm8 362]

Because even with those speeds, most SSDs generally don't fill up the bandwidth available through SATA3.

 

There are some very expensive units you can get which are basically two or four SSDs in a RAID1 array and those go into a PCI Express slot, but they're just real expensive.

 

Back to the original topic:

Don't use OpenGL mode.

The slow loading is NAM31's fault and we're working on curbing it. (The game is parsing a several hundred megabyte file on one core then storing it in either the RAM or Virtual Memory. It's going to take time)

The crashing is NAM31's fault and we're working on curbing it.

There's no such thing as the HD9800.