memory and sc4

[47ply 1,100]

I play the game on an old emachines desk top with hard drive at 200 gb and memory at 1024 ddr2.

 

My question will buying larger memory sticks help the performance of the game. it seems to get very slow with any population of 200,000 or more. I am not worried about loading speeds as I am in no hurry as when I play I play for hours at end. I never have the dreaded crashes I hear about. but scrolling problems make the game unplayable at times. I hear of citys of 100,000,000 sims but this would be impossible at this rate on my machine.

 

thanks for any help as I know not much about the mechanics of computers

 

47ply

[Compdude787 916]

Having more memory might help improve the game's performance a bit, but having an SSD will really improve load times. Good luck at finding more DDR2 memory, though; DDR3 has been the standard for the past 4-5 years. You may have to end up searching Ebay.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

More than 4 GB won't buy you anything, but a 64-bit machine with 4GB will install the patch that allows up to 3 GB for any program and improve SC4 somewhat.  A large plugin suite, however, is best managed on an SSD.  Since the storage is often referenced during play with heavy custom content, the elimination of rotational latency will clearly improve the performance.

 

You really should consider a newer box of tricks.  Rule of thumb for general machines is 2GB per core (4 GB minimum)

[dogma555 187]

The peak memory usage I've ever seen anyway is 1.1GB. So , you might benefit from a wee bit more ram, considering my total machines ram usage (to run the operating system) would be about 1.5GB... and about 2.0GB with firefox loaded up with tabs.

 

Dreaded crash people must not have disabled extra cores on their processors, put SC4.exe priority on high, or be playing in software mode!

 

 

Having more memory might help improve the game's performance a bit, but having an SSD will really improve load times. Good luck at finding more DDR2 memory, though; DDR3 has been the standard for the past 4-5 years. You may have to end up searching Ebay.

 

I've been meaning to try an SSD in the machine I run SC4 on. What were your load time differences like for say, launching sc4.exe, launching tiles with ~500k populations, and launching the landmark menu with a large plugin folder?

[47ply 1,100]

what is a SSD? and so far it looks like spending money wont help much and super high populations really isn't  my real goal making eye pleasing cities is my main goal. its just that I saw some memory sticks and if it helped a huge amount I would buy them

 

thanks for the advise even though I didn't understand much of it lol

[Compdude787 916]

Having more memory might help improve the game's performance a bit, but having an SSD will really improve load times. Good luck at finding more DDR2 memory, though; DDR3 has been the standard for the past 4-5 years. You may have to end up searching Ebay.

 

I've been meaning to try an SSD in the machine I run SC4 on. What were your load time differences like for say, launching sc4.exe, launching tiles with ~500k populations, and launching the landmark menu with a large plugin folder?

I don't actually have an SSD (solid state drive) on my computer, but I've been considering getting one. It is quite a bit faster than a hard drive, basically uses flash memory like you'd find in a USB flash drive. (aka thumb drives) It is a lot more reliable than hard drives because it won't crash. (no moving parts) It's very reliable, and can last a heck of a long time. They're still far more expensive than hard drives, but prices are coming down, so at some point it would be worth it.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Just a word about SSDs.  Even with modern technology, they are not magic.  Never use the SSD space for a file that is often rewritten as SSDs fail sooner than rotating storage when you do that.  SSDs should be for read-mostly data, which works out fine for plugins but not for city files under development which are written often.  You might get away with it, but be sure you have a backup elsewhere.

 

Once you get an SSD, you will need to know more than somewhat about the file system.  Plugins should be accessed using a short-cut from the game's regular user structure.  Works like a charm, and the game won't know you did it.  I don't have an SSD but I have placed my plugins on a different disk from the SC4 user structure using a shortcut to the plugins folder.  Name must be Plugins.

 

A caveat about rotating storage and Microsoft's NTFS file manager.  Once a week, run the defragmentation utility on the rotating storage under NTFS.  This will compact the multiple extents created when working on a city file, which often overflow to multiple extents when new material is added.  If this has never been run, be prepared for a long haul the first time.  After that, it is fairly quick.

[Jim14409 448]

I just upgraded my five year old 64 bit machine from 4 Gig of RAM to 6 Gig over the weekend and while the difference is not huge it is noticeable, even for SC4. One of my cities of 4K population was slow to load and crashed easily. Last night I played it for about two hours and no crashes and zooming in and out was like it was at 100K. Another thing that makes a difference is the video card. Last Spring I went from 512 MB card to 1 Gig and saw a lot of improvement. Have been wondering if going to a two Gig card would make any improvement. (?)

 

Unfortunately I cannot say you will have the same good results that I have had. You may or you may not. Every machine is different as each one is set up and loaded differently.

 

If you have not done so already, you can squeeze out a little more from your present set-up most likely. Go into Task Manager (press "Ctrl - Alt - Delete" keys) and end any processes that are not absolutely necessary. If you shut down the wrong one the worst that will happen is that your computer shuts down. Just reboot and don't shut that one down again "Desktop Window Manager" is probably one of the larger processes in the list, mine is usually around 35K. It takes two tries to shut this file down and it will suspend your custom desktop colors and other personalizations, freeing up that system memory. The running of your computer and SC4 will not be impacted except to have a bit more memory available. I keep a tight reign on my start-up files as well. Most I find unnecessary. How often do you burn a CD/DVD? Is it needful that that software always be running and waiting? Not for me.

 

You may already have considered these things but if not they can sometimes help. Think of it as trying to squeeze the last sliver of toothpaste from the tube.

 

As for buying DDR2 RAM I bought mine from Amazon. If you don't buy it all I plan to add another two Gig soon which will put me at my max of 8Gig which probably won't help SC4 but at least there will be plenty in the pot if SC4 needs it and it is able to be utilized.

 

Good luck!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

With Windoze, too many processes are active in the background when they don't really need to be.  MS likes to mother hen the user.  Currently my system reports 2 out of 225 processes running.  The rest are sleeping on time-outs or I/O.  Running Ubuntu 14.04

[47ply 1,100]

but how do you know what you need running? and how to stop them from running? when I looked at all the programs in task manager is saw some I could do with out but my only option was to terminate them I could not find a place to turn them off with out removing them

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You need to look into the services side of your O/S.  There is a services manager that controls most of the miscellaneous things like the file indexer (which has been a curse in the past).  I haven't run windows in so long, I forget how to access this, but I am sure someone will chime in on it.

[Compdude787 916]

You need to look into the services side of your O/S.  There is a services manager that controls most of the miscellaneous things like the file indexer (which has been a curse in the past).  I haven't run windows in so long, I forget how to access this, but I am sure someone will chime in on it.

To access the services manager, open up the Start Menu (in Windows 7) and in the search bar, type in services.msc, then select the Services icon in the list that appears. I sometimes have to do this if, for some stupid reason, the print spooler service got stopped.

[cogeo 960]

C'mon guys! Get an SSD for a computer using DDR2 memory? Really? What a waste! I doubt if it will even be possible to connct the SSD there. SSDs now are SATA-III, while that PC is probably simple SATA, or even IDE. The best would be to replace the computer instead. It's old, and at some point something will break! Make backups of your valuable data often!

 

So consider getting a new PC, instead of making such questionable upgrades or additions, which are going to cost a lot, offer too little, and last for a really short time (either the graphics card, MoBo, CPU, HDD etc will fail, or you will want to replace the computer anyway because it's too old). It's not going to cost much, if you don't get the most featured components. Eg why get a 6-core CPU? It will cost a lot and within 6 months will be worth half the price. And the most important is that no applications will be using those 6 cores (it's not a busy server, running multiple applications/threads in parallel, and it's not even sure that your applications can utilize multiple cores), which means that it's just waste! Get a CPU with 2 cores instead (they are more than enough for home PCs), but higher frequency. I replaced mine recently, and got new case, super-efficient PSU (Corsair), Gigabyte MoBo (with FM2 socket), 3.2GHz A4000 CPU (I can put a larger one later but... I doubt so), 4GB RAM, 1TB WD HDD, 1GB Sapphire Graphics card, for under €300 (23% VAT included). It would be even cheaper if I hadn't got the DVD-RW drive (which becomes less and less necessary, as many applications are in electronic form nowadays, and as Windows 8 mounts a CD/DVD image simply by double-clicking on it - most applications are available as an image, ie the physical CD/DVD becomes more and more rare), and/or I just used the onboard GPU. So I got a brand-new machine, not the fastest around, but modern, efficient, upgradable, and with a large HD, all at a very low cost. And if anybody tells me about not being a good buy or I'll soon need a faster one or so, I will answer that it is upgradable and it cost just what others love to pay for the CPU alone, hoping that it will run their applications faster, which is rarely the case cause most applications are I/O-bound (waiting for an I/O operation to be carried-out, some server to respond, or the i-net) rather than CPU-bound.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Unless you are having annoyingly long load times and pauses when changing the POV an SSD is a waste and only some more gear to worry about.

[Turjan 1,048]

Unless you are having annoyingly long load times and pauses when changing the POV an SSD is a waste...

 

In that specific case, yes, it's a waste, as cogeo explained. On the other hand, using an SSD as system partition for Windows is pretty standard today. That cuts down on the computer start-up time a lot.