Steam Hardware Glitch

[Nirwanda 133]

Okay after surfing around for ages and scouring the forums of multiple sites I'm now going to ask for myself before admitting defeat.

 

I downloaded Sim City Deluxe through steam and when I first booted it up I noticed insane graphics glitches, like flashing, lagging and occasional CTD when HD or terrain mods are added etc.

 

When I turned hardware rendering off this solved the problem, but now I am wanting to use several mods with HD and other elements that require the game to be run in Hardware rendering mode. Could anybody happen to know of any fixes to this problem? Or if it is a terminal flaw for the steam mounted version of Sim City..?

 

My computer stats (if you promise not to laugh, i'm poor and saving up for an upgrade but work is hard to come by in Australia);

 

Macbook with 2.8GHz i7 Processor, 4GB RAM, Mavericks OS (to help run SC2013)

 

but it is run through VMware Fusion 6 on Windows XP SP3, which makes it quite a bit slower I am aware but it is still playable

 

Anyway thanks for taking the time out to read and think, I'm gonna put an ask out in General Discussion to see about non HD Terrain Mods to help me not CTD when I open a city tile.

 

Cheers all.

[pjk64 6]

Smooth hardware rendering is more a question of your system GPU than CPU alone. What graphics adapter are you employing? It could just be that your adapter isn't up to snuff. That said, downloading and installing the latest drivers for your video card would be a good first step. You didn't mention if you run other graphic intensive applications without issue, but SimCity 4 is a bit old, and as such doesn't have the minimum requirements of, let's say, Mass Effect 3.

\

There is a limit to how many HD mods one can add to a system. My graphics adapter is a few years old and I ran into HD mods issues when playing Skyrim (another Steam game). My GPU just couldn't handle all the vectors from all the HD mods I loaded up. I had to back track a few to lower resolution models.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Also, may I suggest you get rid of VM-ware and use the more direct windows executive layer (wine or wineskin) which act more like a JIT compiler for windows calls rather than a full-time interpreter.  This has a bit of a learning curve, so here is my script (Linux) to start the game under wine:

 

#!/bin/bash
date
env WINEPREFIX="/home/john/.wine" \
wine "C:/Program Files (x86)/Maxis/SimCity 4 Deluxe/Apps/SimCity 4.exe" \
 -intro:off -CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32 -d:directx \
 -CPUCount:1 -f &>~/sc4.log
date

Notes:  The opening and closing date commands are so I can know how long I've played.  On Linux the file name separator is slash (/) and the backslash (\) is the escape character;  in this case it suppresses the newline to join lines together.  The shell parameter &>~/sc4.log directs the wine console to the file /home/john/sc4.log for debugging purposes when something frogs (usually doesn't).

 

If you want to change from hardware rendering to software change -d:directx to -d:software.

 

To use the game in a wine(skin) environment you need to install the game under that protocol and use the winetricks script to add both the flex-grid controls to your windows environment.  These are needed to process the NAM installer.