Laptop configuration

[Nothingman49 1]

Hi all, I want to get back into SimCity and I am wondering if the laptop (because work will pay for a laptop under a certain point) below would meet the specifications need to play. Any thoughts, tips or tricks would be great… FYI I am not tech savvy….like really really not tech savvy. 
 

• Intel Core i7 11th Gen 1165G7 2.8GHz Processor
• NVIDIA GeForce MX450 2GB GDDR5
• 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM
• 1TB HDD+256GB SSD
• Microsoft Windows 11 Home
• 2x2 802.11ac Wireless+Bluetooth 5.0
• 17.3" HD+ BrightView Touch Display

Thank you all! 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,046]

Are you familliar with this site?

https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri

It auto-detects your system configuration. You can simply choose the game you wish to check and it will return the "verdict". Not sure if SC4 is listed there but go ahead and check.

EDIT: Oopsie... The question is... do you already have this rig, or do you just plan to buy it? 

[Nothingman49 1]

Still in the planning stages, want to make sure whatever I get will run it. Thanks for the site though! 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,046]

5 minutes ago, Nothingman49 said:

Still in the planning stages, want to make sure whatever I get will run it.

Ahhh, ok. Of course you actually need to have such and such computer to be able to run it through the site. 

If anything else fails, you might as well want to create a partition on your new computer... and run SC4 through Windows XP on it...

I'm not too sure about the technical details of how this is made on Windows system. It is, however, a perfectly viable option on Mac, where you can simply install Windows and run it through bootcamp.

[rsc204 21,806]

17 hours ago, Nothingman49 said:

I want to get back into SimCity and I am wondering if the laptop (because work will pay for a laptop under a certain point) below would meet the specifications need to play.

I could list the minimum specs for SC4, but it would be rather a waste of time as it's so ancient as to be irrelevant, (for example a Pentium III 500Mhz CPU). Ten years ago, practically any computer you might buy was more than powerful enough to not only run SC4, but run it as well as anyone can, this has not changed.

To be direct, yes the computer you list should play SC4 just fine. Why should?, well the issue you have is not if you have enough power, but rather whether your shiny new hardware can still remain compatible with all the archaic functions SC4 needs to run.

Generally speaking, the only real problem here is your graphics card and it's ability to 'communicate' with the very out of date DirectX 7, which SC4 uses. The reason this is a problem, is because we're now on DirectX 12 and it's already been causing problems for years that new GPUs don't natively support DirectX 7. The good news is that by using a simple 'translator' known as a DirectX Wrapper, it can convert any calls between the version your system supports and legacy versions of DirectX. My hunch would be most systems bought today would require this to function with SC4.

A similar discussion came up recently, as they do periodically, the answer is always the same, it doesn't really matter what you buy, just expect to need to do some tweaking to get the game running. Likewise don't buy a system around playing SC4, buy a system considering all your needs, bearing in mind unless you are running the latest games or doing some serious number-crunching, there isn't a Laptop today that won't do web browsing and office work really well (fast). My 2010 ThinkPad is hardly setting records, but with an SSD (fast hard drive) it boots Windows in 30seconds and runs everything very smoothly.

14 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

If anything else fails, you might as well want to create a partition on your new computer... and run SC4 through Windows XP on it...

I'm not too sure about the technical details of how this is made on Windows system. It is, however, a perfectly viable option on Mac, where you can simply install Windows and run it through bootcamp.

Not really an option on a modern PC, theoretically possible but technically complex and most likely to result in catastrophic problems for most users. Windows 11 requires a secure booting process that essentially makes this impossible, but even with older systems you might easily end up with a system that stops booting if you don't really know what you are doing.

Then again, this isn't an option any longer for Mac's either, BootCamp was binned entirely with MacOS 11 and/or the new M series CPUs. However, Mac's haven't supported XP for a very long time either, not to mention you can't simply run old operating systems like XP on hardware that they were not designed to be used with. I'd imagine this would be a lot of trouble for any system from 2010 or later, if for no other reason than the lack of drivers required to make it work.