Documentation of issues with SC4 on Intel Arc

[Leo -- 186]

Copy of the relevant bits of the description:

This video was made to document graphical glitches when running SimCity 4 on Intel Arc, I thought I'd document this since I'm probably the only person in the world to run this game on such hardware. 

Now these bugs are to be expected since SimCity 4 uses a very old version of DirectX, DirectX 8.1 to be exact and the Intel Xe-HPG instruction set architecture only natively supports DirectX 12 and Vulkan.

Now Intel's Arc cards are not the only cards that have issues with running this game as nVida's RTX 30 series dropped native support DirectX 8 and similar glitches can be seen when running SimCity 4 on those cards as well. dxvk is known to solve such graphical issues on the RTX 30 series, however I have yet to try out dxvk on this game. I will post a link to a Simtropolis talking about these issues and my attempts to fix them.

 

Since then I've tried dxvk but haven't really played around with it and so far while the bugs still happen, they happen less frequently.

Note to mods I'm not sure where to post it so I posted it here.

[Ulisse Wolf 4,412]

The problem has already been solved and we have created a guide specifically to set SC4 correctly on modern hardware

You have to consider that there are issues on how SC4 is rendered as SC4 uses hybrid rendering (Software + Hardware) which causes other problems. (In fact, those of RTX Remix are having problems implementing RTX features on SC4) Also these problems that has SC4 is having them The Sims 2 because the code of TS2 is identical to that of SC4 and therefore share the same problems

[mindaugas 18]

Old post but figured I would reply since this came up in my googling. I was having the same problems with a new HP spectre w/ ultra 7 155h and Intel Arc graphics. I used dgvoodoo and configured it using the dgvoodoo 3d accelerated card (under directx tab). Then replaced the d3d9.dll with the newer larger one from dxvk in the apps folder. That resolved the issues and the game runs fine at 2560x1600 with no weird artifacts. 

I also have a PC with a RTX 3080 and just plain old dgvoodoo solved those issues. Able to run it at 4k or any other resolution.