How to Run SimCity 4 Smoothly?

[Propfam 2,308]

Hello,

I have a midrange laptop with Ryzen 5 2500U, 8 gigs of RAM (non dual-channel unfortunately), 1 TB of mechanical drive, and (if I remembered correctly) 1809 Windows 10. For mods, I only have NAM, CAM, SC4Fix, and other little ones. With this spec however, the game still stutters, even in 30K population city, although not as laggy as my older laptop. I have seen a YouTuber running SimCity 4 very smoothly. How to run SimCity 4 smoothly? Should I upgrade the mechanical drive? Is the RAM an issue? Is a 10,000 dollars PC with i9-10900K, RTX 2080 Ti, 64 GB of DDR4 (or in near future, DDR5) RAM, and 4 TB of pro-grade (or even enterprise grade) NVMe SSDs worth it? (That's an exaggeration, but you get the idea)

Thanks.

[rsc204 21,867]

43 minutes ago, chfzdn said:

Should I upgrade the mechanical drive?

Yes, yes, yes. In terms of your spec, this is the only area I see the potential for improving SC4 performance. If your machine supports it, an NVMe SSD is the way to go. Faster may be better, but your system bus has to be able to keep up, so I wouldn't waste money on anything not consumer grade unless you can justify it for other purposes.

Less than 100€ get's you a 1TB Intel NVMe SSD, which capacity-wise is about as cheap as you can get for the money. Intel also gives a 5 year warranty, but of course there are other options out there.

43 minutes ago, chfzdn said:

Is the RAM an issue?

No. SC4 is a 32-bit application and can never use more than 2GB of RAM as a result.

Ensuring you've used the 4GB patch on a 64-bit OS is all you need do to ensure SC4 can make use of it's full 2GB quota. Likewise, if you're using more than 6GB ram for Windows and other applications and try to run SC4, then SC4 may not have it's full 2GB to work with. But that's unlikely and easily rectified by closing some apps. Unless you simply must multi-task to that extent, there is nothing to be gained from more RAM.

43 minutes ago, chfzdn said:

Is a 10,000 dollars PC with i9-10900K, RTX 2080 Ti, 64 GB of DDR4 (or in near future, DDR5) RAM, and 4 TB of pro-grade (or even enterprise grade) NVMe SSDs worth it?

Not only is it not worth it, it's a total waste of your money if you are not going to be using that machine for other tasks that justify it. One thing people always neglect too, running a rig like that would probably use 2x-3x the amount of power, meaning it's costing you more in electricity too.

It breaks down like this, SC4 was designed in the early 2000's, the best computer at the time was a Pentium 4, graphics cards might have a whopping 256MB of memory, systems with 1GB RAM were practically unheard of and very costly, everyone was using normal HDDs. As a result, SC4 simply doesn't need any part of your system to be particularly powerful to run. Or to put that another way, pretty much any modern computer can handle SC4 and the game should play real well.

Adding mods, especially the number of them many of us play with, of course does increase the requirements for good performance. But there are only two areas that really make any difference to the speed of the game. The first is your CPU, specifically how fast a single core is able to run. SC4 can only use a single core, so having a 20-core monster doesn't actually make it run better. The second is how fast the game can read data from your hard drive and switch that into RAM. This is mostly affected by the speed of the drive, hence SSDs are great for SC4.

There are however other caveats, for example a single core of a modern CPU is much faster than a P4 chip could dream of. But we can't tap into all that potential, SC4 wasn't coded to work with the architecture required to utilise their speed improvements. The biggest single problem though is hardware and driver compatibility for the legacy DirectX 9.0 that SC4 needs to run optimally. If your card doesn't do this, or doesn't do it well, performance suffers and on a laptop you're stuck with the GPU it came with.

I will add, I've seen some configuration changes that improve performance for ATI GPU users. Start by seeing if setting the "Fast Card" profile manually helps.

All things considered, simply throwing money at the problem is not a good idea, there are diminishing returns. A little investment in the right area though, might really help.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

First search out and read existing threads and apply their wisdom (e.g. the 4GB patch, dat-packing some plugins etc).

Then tell us about the trees you planted in your city. Did you spam a million seasonal trees and expect your laptop to keep up with them all?

And then there's your laptop's other loads. Could something outside SC4 be interrupting the game or claiming a bunch of the RAM?  Web browsers are notorious memory hogs, so shut down your browser and other non-essential apps before launching SC4.

Finally, if your machine has multiple cores, try some core management to first reserve one whole physical core (prevent anything from using it by default) and then launching SC4 in a way that explicitly runs it on that core. Incidentally, running the game that way (called CPU Affinity) can also achieve the effect of -CPUCount:1

[rsc204 21,867]

10 minutes ago, jeffryfisher said:

Finally, if your machine has multiple cores, try some core management to first reserve one whole physical core (prevent anything from using it by default) and then launching SC4 in a way that explicitly runs it on that core. Incidentally, running the game that way (called CPU Affinity) can also achieve the effect of -CPUCount:1

Honestly I seriously doubt this would lead to any discernible improvement, because the system does all this automatically. When it detects a process needs all of one core, it offloads everything else to the others. This is especially the case where SC4 is the application in focus and everything else is treated as a background task.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

the system does all this automatically

Forms of Unix/Linux might, but at the risk of sounding cynical, I'll never trust Microsoft to manage anything intelligently.

[rsc204 21,867]

3 minutes ago, jeffryfisher said:

I'll never trust Microsoft to manage anything intelligently.

I think you do them a disservice, modern Windows is not the 9x releases level of horror. It's fairly standard kernel stuff to manage multi-core processors to eek every drop of performance out of them.

But it's a simple enough test to try it with a reserved core and then without and see if you are really getting more performance. If there is no noticeable difference, I'd trust Windows to handle the fundamentals.

[catty-cb 4,413]

3 hours ago, rsc204 said:

I think you do them a disservice, modern Windows is not the 9x releases level of horror.

I went over to using Linux Mint on my home computer a few years back cos of the mess the windows patches were making on my PC .... and when I got a new computer I wiped out Win10 on it and put the latest version of linux mint on it .... then Covid-19 happened and the help desk at work announced it would only support your computer at home if it was running Windows (we don't use Win10 at work) so I installed Windows 10 on my old computer which I'd luckily kept.

I have to say I've been pleasantly surprised how much I like Win10 and how well it's been working on my old computer.

[rivit 3,402]

Additional to the excellent considerations above also make use of the options in game. If you put everything on high on a small/low power CPU machine then you will give the CPU a hard time.

The log that SC4 makes on startup (in install folder \Apps\MACHINENAME-config.txt) will tell you what it thinks SC4 would run best with on your setup. You do need to read this with some knowledge of game terms so ask if you're not sure.  Here is the salient section on my machine from 2013 - Win10 1903, CPUi5 3570K, 16GB,  ATI RX570 (this is a replacement as the older ATI 7870 failed), Samsung 840PRO 256MB SST. This is a more than competent machine for everything I do (office, dev, art, games) which is why I still have it.

Options
-------
Visual Effects       current:   3 recommended:   3
Cars/Sims            current:   3 recommended:   3
Shadows              current:   2 recommended:   3
Atmospheric effects  current:   1 recommended:   1
Water effects        current:   0 recommended:   1
Software/Hardware    current:   1 recommended:   1
Cursor               current:   1 recommended:   1
VariableSpeedAutomata current:   1 recommended:   1
Translucent UI       current:   1 recommended:   1
Graphic Detail       current:   3 recommended:   3
Building Load Speed  current:   3 recommended:   3
Texture Quality      current:   3 recommended:   3
 

The one option that eats cycles most is the shadows - on high this is a noticeable drain - unless you're doing art shots leave it on medium or low - as I have (ymmv). I just happen to have waves off atm while I work on river water.

Even then there are times in the processing cycle when events, display + animations, calculations and asset management all want something serviced at the same time on one thread and you'll get little fits and starts (shows up with automata jumping forward). The more you scroll about the more it has to do - sometimes just leave it in one view to settle down. The game tries to maintain a steady 30fps(!) and manages quite well most of the time - this app was extremely well engineered in many different senses.  

[xxdita 1,097]

Keep all non-SC4 files out of your Plugins. You can use BSC Cleanitol with the text file I've posted in this post at SC4D. 

Also, I cannot recommend running DataNode enough. It will help you find unnecessary and duplicate or overriding files so fast.

[Propfam 2,308]

I found an interesting fact. If I set to

Then the FPS would be

Not a pleasant gameplay. Let's turn down the settings.

Then,

The game is quite smooth at 30 fps. It's actually capable running at 60 fps. But for some reason, the game is quickly lock the FPS to 30. I guess some calculations are out of window with more than 30 fps. It turns out that turning down the settings makes the game running at 30 instead of 15 or so. I don't know what makes the performance slow with all high settings. Maybe, I'm not using SSD. Maybe, my CPU single-core performance isn't that great. Let me know what's exactly the problem. Side note, I've added my GPU to the list of fast cards.

[rivit 3,402]

The game seems to be designed for 33 1/3 fps internally for a locked display rate of 30fps (movie speed) . Anything over 24fps is smooth enough to the human eye. This was pretty amazing in 2003 given what needed to be done with hardware of that era and all that interleaved on a single thread.

Of all the options available Shadows has the greatest effect - you can generally run with the rest on high but as soon as you up the shadows a lot more graphics preparatory work needs to be done.

Other fps killers are

• scrolling a full map - like above - resources may have to come from disk and everything needs to be resynched and re-rendered
• editing - the background anims/graphics work are deferred in favour of user interface response - logical if you want people to play it.  

The frame rate isn't as important as the smooth operation - from time to time it will stutter as N tasks all needing to be done at once collide. This cannot be helped, in fact even modern multi cpu/gpu games come up against this from time to time.

[Propfam 2,308]

It turns out that BL Radical of NAM is the culprit of the issue or more like, myself. I think the option is just 10% decrease in performance, but it's more like 20-30% decrease. After removing that, the game is faster. But still, stutters are still happening when I scroll the city unlike using all low setting. Does SSD help in this situation?

Speaking of CPU power, when do I switch to faster CPU? When the game can't keep up with the city size? Or when just situation like this?

[rivit 3,402]

My experience is that because it is a single threaded app you can get more per unit time out of a faster CPU, so it will be a bit smoother, but it shows up as being able to build a larger city (time to do the home-work path finding) and housekeeping more than anything - double the CPU doesn't mean twice as fast in fps. The game is CPU bound but defers/simplifies what it can't do on time.  Its also interesting to consider that a simple modern Intel i3 CPU is at least 256x times more powerful than a Pentium 4 was when the game was built. I can remember the early days - today luxury. ;-)

For retrieving stuff maximising the available memory on the machine has the biggest benefit on Windows. In addition to the game's memory cache of about 1.2GB, Windows will keep a most recently used file cache in memory if it can. This helps avoid disk accesses. Since modern Windows itself keeps getting bigger, 4GB of memory would seem a minimum to gain benefit of both caches these days. More is better but not absolutely necessary - this game will run in <2GB on a Pentium 4(just)- it was built for XP. Obviously SSD or even faster M.2 solid disks will help resource loading - but most of that is at game start time or city loading time.  First time city loading is almost always slower than subsequent loads for this reason, as the caches get built along the way.  

I suspect (but haven't actually measured) that using a moderate plugin collection also helps - if the game needs more than 1.2GB of active plugins at once in a given city the cache cannot hold everything - this has to include textures for terrain, networks and lots/props.  The exemplars and models are trivial when compared to the texture load. If some terrain, prop or building texture is HD then the largest ones are 4x as large as equivalent SD textures. HD looks nice but it doesn't come for free.

That said, 1.2GB is a lot of space to fill, and SC4 seems pretty cunning about what it keeps in cache. By the time you've used up the cache I imagine your city is already slow to run and render anyway. I never cease to be amazed at what we can (and do) throw at this old game...     

 

[rsc204 21,867]

FPS may be important when running fast paced games like racing and FPS (first person shooters), but in what sense does this matter when building a city? Given the hardware constraints, locking the FPS at 30 or so, is a fair trade off to prevent the system being so overwhelmed.

The game can not take advantage of 10 year old GPUs, let alone modern stuff. Literally a GTX 750ti is practically idling whilst running to the max with post processing effects like 8xAA set in NVidia Control panel. Adding lots of 3D models running around (Radical automata), does have a noticeable performance hit. But that's simply because the game can't make use of the hardware you have, so simply upgrading it won't help.

An SSD helps with everything, because the flow of data across the system is greatly improved by this technology. Even for 10 year old hardware, a traditional HDD will be the biggest bottleneck in your system. Can it perform miracles, no, but it’s a sound investment, giving a great trade off between cost and performance improvement. Especially if you don’t need a huge one, 256GB models are easily in the 30 (£/$/€) price range now.

A faster CPU is much more debatable and not a cheap upgrade. If you have a laptop, likely it means a new machine. Even if you have a desktop, it’ll need to fit the current socket, unless you are starting with say a Pentium or i3 and moving to a high end i5/i7, especially if doing this only for SC4, it’s probably a waste of money. But if you jump a few generations ahead, there may be some performance gains, but do they justify the cost, I don’t personally think so.

It's interesting because now you've brought this up, I've sort of had a realisation. Let's compare the latest Mac version of SC4 with the Windows one for a moment.

The 64-Bit Mac version has the following benefits. Performance issues are a thing of the past, it runs beautifully on a MacMini 2012 with Intel graphics. This is I suspect a combination of being both 64-bit and more importantly, able to utilise multi-core processing and GPUs. It's amazing what you don't really notice, but it's clear to me now, since we can't use the Windows-only command line arguments, it simply must be multi-core compliant, otherwise it would be unstable all the time like the Windows version, right? The 64-bit part is less important, @Haljackey as one of the users I know with both the largest Plugins suite and who regularly makes very large population cities. Could you perhaps load a big city, tell us the size of your population/plugins, then how much RAM usage SC4 is showing in Task Manager whilst running? Because, we're limited to 2GB RAM, but I don't know of anyone who's ever got anywhere near that limit. I think this would be interesting data to show how close we might be.

However, the drawbacks of the Mac version start with it being based off the unpatched Windows version of SC4, so basically the equivalent of the borked Origin edition. The splash screen even shows "SC4 Rush Hour" and not "Deluxe Edition", which just shows Aspyr aren't very interested in doing things properly IMO. It also contains a plethora of stupid and annoying issues that couldn't be that hard to solve, if they actually gave a crap about doing so. You simply must DATPack your Plugins to have any hope of keeping the game stable for example. But much worse, stupid visual glitches, tiles and their textures DO NOT blend seamlessly, instead look like this ugly mess (farm and country club):

Perhaps that's my GPU, could other Apple users perhaps confirm if they can play without this issue? Then you can't use a wheel mouse to scroll the menus, you can't disable the intro videos, which whilst minor is getting on my wick. Then you must CTRL+Tab or you jump two items at once, I mean did anyone even test the last update?, even the base game has Tab-Rings! Basically, if you've experienced the Windows version, like me I can't imagine you could just ignore all these stupid things. Note there are more annoyances too, I just can't think of them all right now. Overall it's playable, it's just not the experience I am used too.

Then if we look at the PC game, we're suffering from the fact that EA never supported or patched the game, despite milking this cash cow to death over the years. But on the flip side, we can run it in DirectX mode, where the game can look visually stunning. The game is inherently stable, if setup correctly, sans compatibility issues. We just have to accept the performance suffers a little, whenever cities/regions get beyond a certain size/level of detail. Just imagine a world where we could have the best of both versions combined, I mean we all are Paying for SC4. If only gamers or consumers in general, would demand better, refraining from paying for things that could and should work better. Honestly, EA could probably re-sell the game to half the community again, not even just for $20 either, if they would just put a little work into it, we'd all be like "shut up and take our money". But that's not how these things work sadly.

[City_Slider 2,716]

On 25.5.2020 at 10:23 PM, xxdita said:

Also, I cannot recommend running DataNode enough. It will help you find unnecessary and duplicate or overriding files so fast.

Sorry to bother you, but is there a "How Too" out, how to use it? Im lost with it :-(

Greets, Oliver

[rsc204 21,867]

19 minutes ago, City_Slider said:

Sorry to bother you, but is there a "How Too" out, how to use it? Im lost with it :-(

There should be a readme or documentation, I can't remember.

But the tool assumes a level of understanding of SC4 File and Data types. First you scan your Plugins, then you can sift through the data, it will show many different things such as Overrides which can be filtered in the results. But I have to warn you, doing this the first time on a large suite of Plugins, will probably lead to data overload. Not that I think it's a bad tool in any way, I love it, but it isn't a beginners tool either, it assumes a certain level of understanding to really get the best out of it.

If you just quickly need to know what files override a specific one, the Plugins Analyser included with Reader, is actually much more efficient a process in practise. But if you are determined to completely optimise everything, there's nothing quite like DataNode for achieving this.

[City_Slider 2,716]

Thanks a lot. Sounds like some loooong Night´s ;-)

[twalsh102 1,601]

3 hours ago, City_Slider said:

Sorry to bother you, but is there a "How Too" out, how to use it? Im lost with it :-(

If you haven't found it yet, when you open the program, the top button on the right-hand bar is "Docs", i.e. the User Manual.

[City_Slider 2,716]

Thanks for your Answer. After i DLéd it agin, i got the "Re Me". Thanks

[Haljackey 17,398]

6 hours ago, rsc204 said:

The 64-bit part is less important, @Haljackey as one of the users I know with both the largest Plugins suite and who regularly makes very large population cities. Could you perhaps load a big city, tell us the size of your population/plugins, then how much RAM usage SC4 is showing in Task Manager whilst running? Because, we're limited to 2GB RAM, but I don't know of anyone who's ever got anywhere near that limit. I think this would be interesting data to show how close we might be.

Sure thing!

Just checked out of curiosity and I am frequently at or above 2.5GB of memory (DDR3) use with SC4 running in one of my larger cities. This city has 2.5 million Sims and and 2 million jobs (with lots of commuters coming in from cities on all sides).

My plugins size is currently 7.5GB

 

My machine is from 2010, with a upgraded graphics card from 2015 so I could run Skylines a bit more smoothly. I think I have 4GB of VRAM to help out.

[rsc204 21,867]

11 minutes ago, Haljackey said:

Just checked out of curiosity and I am frequently at or above 2.5GB of memory (DDR3) use with SC4 running in one of my larger cities.

Huh, I didn't think it was possible to go over 2GB for a 32-bit application, so if nothing else you've shattered that myth.

18 minutes ago, Haljackey said:

This city has 2.5 million Sims and and 2 million jobs (with lots of commuters coming in from cities on all sides).

But certainly I think you must be giving SC4 one of the hardest workouts of anyone, thanks for coming back to us, some interesting data there.

[rivit 3,402]

@Haljackey that's very interesting. It's the first time I've ever seen the game use more than 1.8GB  - perhaps evidence that the 4GB patch (which we need for NAM) actually works on the game cache too. Also that's a big city...

[Haljackey 17,398]

9 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Huh, I didn't think it was possible to go over 2GB for a 32-bit application, so if nothing else you've shattered that myth.

But certainly I think you must be giving SC4 one of the hardest workouts of anyone, thanks for coming back to us, some interesting data there.

Haha, happy to help I guess. It's one of the reasons I don't have any short term goals of upgrading my PC. While most of the guts are 10+ years old now, I've got something that works and I don't want SC4 to run like a turd if I upgrade my system out of genuine fear. Hope it can keep running fine.

I also had real fear just upgrading my OS from Windows 7 to 10. I was one of the last holdouts and had a lot of issues with the game after that happened. However most of them were sorted with running the game on a special fully-patched Origin version of the game on a SSD.

6 hours ago, rivit said:

@Haljackey that's very interesting. It's the first time I've ever seen the game use more than 1.8GB  - perhaps evidence that the 4GB patch (which we need for NAM) actually works on the game cache too. Also that's a big city...

Yes absolutely. I applied the 4GB patch long ago (before it was required for the NAM) and I've noticed the game using 3+ GB of RAM at certain strenuous times. Loading these fully developed city tiles pushes the RAM usage high, and so does recording sessions I have in the game (UDI or otherwise).

Something like this vid for example likely pushed my RAM usage to the 4GB cap. It's probably the maximum amount of demand the game will ever put on your system... pressing play on a fully zoned city tile. Not only does it show you the growth but it has to calculate all the patching and service demands on a ever-changing, fast basis.

As expected, FPS goes down the toilet in these circumstances lol.

Skip to 23 mins in when I press the play button.

 

[Propfam 2,308]

Is there a way to remove 30 fps limit? Also, is there a way to lift the memory allocation limit to more than 4 gigs? Today's patch only for 4 GB, not more, unfortunately. But still an improvement than vanilla.

[rsc204 21,867]

Reading up on this hideously technical side of things, it seems the only way a 32-Bit app can surpass 4GB is if it’s been coded with something known as AWE. That’s not something we could patch into the game. If Win10 ever goes 64-Bit only, EA might have to do something there, but even then it’s uncertain if they’d ever revisit the code.

I don’t know of a way to surpass the 30FPS limit, but again why would you need too? You realise almost every film or TV show you watch is only 24FPS, I’ve never heard people complain about it. Not everything benefits from more FPS is the point, certainly not a city builder. So why chase something that won’t tangibly improve the overall experience? As I alluded too yesterday, it seems the Mac version simply doesn’t have the slowdowns of the Windows one, although I’ve not really tested city sizes beyond 200k Sims yet. That’s beyond the point where my 4th gen i7 system is already having these problems though. And the hardware is a 3rd gen i5 with a fraction of the RAM, not to mention Laptop parts too, which are nothing like the same performance wise. 

[Kloudkicker 4,565]

A few months ago, after play with my nvidia settings for SC4 on my desktop, I am getting 144FPS scrolling and 30FPS at ideal. With the monitor I have capable of 165Hz oc, at 144Hz and 1920x1080x32 resolution for SC4 it is pretty stable thou it will still be a little choppy here and there when scrolling fast. And when the game does a lot of computing at once, it will freeze up for a few seconds. Zooming and rotating will drop it down closer to low 20's on a really large city with a lot of MMP's and seasonal trees, until the screen is refreshed. I always thought it was weird that it settled at 30fps on ideal when I had 144fps set as max. Now I know. I use to run with the FPS counter on so I can see what is happening in the game. And know when it was safer to do a save or big changes in movement. Changing the settings sure seemed to help but I did change a few other settings to match what the game was capable of. I am using Windows 10, a fast SSD, a lot of DD4 RAM, a gen 7 i7, and a nvidia 1070 and 5gb of unpacked plugins. Not one readme, sav, HTML,  or any other non game file in the plugin folders, they slow done load time. Hardware can impact how the game runs, but most important, have a clean plugin folder and make sure all of the patches and updates are installed. Along with the other advice from above.

[ohdude 2,353]

On 2/6/2021 at 7:00 PM, Haljackey said:

Sure thing!

Just checked out of curiosity and I am frequently at or above 2.5GB of memory (DDR3) use with SC4 running in one of my larger cities. This city has 2.5 million Sims and and 2 million jobs (with lots of commuters coming in from cities on all sides).

My plugins size is currently 7.5GB

 

My machine is from 2010, with a upgraded graphics card from 2015 so I could run Skylines a bit more smoothly. I think I have 4GB of VRAM to help out.

WAIT WAIT WAIT!!! I HAVE 3 IMPORTANT QUESTIONS THAT SHOULD BE ANSWERED PLEASE:

1- @Haljackey Which GPU do you have to be able to get a 23.6% of GPU use? (i have a nvidia gtx 1650 max-Q and no possible use of it with SC4)

2- @Haljackey How long does the 7,5 GB of plugins folder takes to load? ( I have between 1.5GB - 2GB of plugins and takes 50-60 seconds to load in a Laptop with Intel core i7-8565U, 1.8 GHz base frequency to 4.8 Ghz turboBoost, 1tb ssd m2 nvme and more than 8 gb ram).

3- @rsc204 I don't want to have more than 2.5GB of plugins getting loaded in more than 1 minute at full performance (visual effects, shadows, building textures,etc at full). Is it possible?

Thanks for your time folks!!