Can plugins cause heavy frame drops?

[zyon2101 12]

Good evening, I've recently cleared my entire plugins folder and decided to use SC4PAC exclusively to manage it (save for a few exceptions like CAM 2.5 and NAM) and performance in my current modpack (855 packages! Dependencies included) is quite abysmal. Scrolling has stuttering all over, zooming in or out takes ages while the lots are being re-rendered, loading into even a small 30k pop city takes almost 10 minutes, and demolishing large buildings freezes the game for several minutes.

All of that left me wondering, can a large number of plugins or maybe a combination of specific plugins cause such a loss of performance? For reference I've already followed the usual guides that involve installing dgVoodoo (Also tried dxWrapper with similar results), the DBPF loading DLL mod, turning off Shadows (alleviates the issue mildly but it's still quite unbearable), using a custom Graphics Rules.sgr file, etc. etc.

[matias93 7,535]

Hi!

The frame rate of the game can be affected by anything that changes what the game has to draw continuously. Thus, mods that add or replace buildings or props shouldn't have a significant effect, but the following will:

• Anything HD, because the game has to load bigger images to draw them on the screen.
• Lots that are too heavy on props, like some pre-made parks, as they increase the number of props to be drawn.
• High settings on the Automata Controller included with the NAM, as it means more vehicles are being modelled at once.
• High settings on the Traffic Controlled included with the NAM, as it is less efficient than the default Low setting at calculating the commuting routes.

In any case, none of those factors should be enough to cause severe frame drops, so I suspect your problem might rather be with your graphics drivers, the exact configuration of the wrapper, or, in the worst case, with your graphics hardware. Ideally, you should start by checking if your graphics drivers are updated, and show us a screenshot of the DgVoodoo2 configuration UI you're using for SimCity 4.

[zyon2101 12]

2 hours ago, matias93 said:

Hi!

The frame rate of the game can be affected by anything that changes what the game has to draw continuously. Thus, mods that add or replace buildings or props shouldn't have a significant effect, but the following will:

• Anything HD, because the game has to load bigger images to draw them on the screen.
• Lots that are too heavy on props, like some pre-made parks, as they increase the number of props to be drawn.
• High settings on the Automata Controller included with the NAM, as it means more vehicles are being modelled at once.
• High settings on the Traffic Controlled included with the NAM, as it is less efficient than the default Low setting at calculating the commuting routes.

In any case, none of those factors should be enough to cause severe frame drops, so I suspect your problem might rather be with your graphics drivers, the exact configuration of the wrapper, or, in the worst case, with your graphics hardware. Ideally, you should start by checking if your graphics drivers are updated, and show us a screenshot of the DgVoodoo2 configuration UI you're using for SimCity 4.

Hey there!

I'm not entirely sure if the props I downloaded are that high resolution (most of them are from mattb325 if that's any indicator).
As for my graphics drivers and hardware: Im running an RTX 3070 driver version 576.02 (screenshot attached), with no issues whatsoever in other games. I've attached 2 screenshots of my dgVoodoo configuration as well. I've tried changing some settings around like Fast Video Memory Access or using a different DirectX version but it made no difference.

[Ulisse Wolf 4,459]

Lately Nvidia drivers have been sucking which can impact performance.

When in doubt you should follow this tutorial guide and set CPU Priority to maximum and install disable fps limits which should improve performance

[zyon2101 12]

3 hours ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

Lately Nvidia drivers have been sucking which can impact performance.

When in doubt you should follow this tutorial guide and set CPU Priority to maximum and install disable fps limits which should improve performance

Im already running both the CPUOptions and DisableFPSLimits DLL mods, with CPUOptions configured to set the game to High priority. One test I've done is to change the game's affinity from my Core 0 to my Core 2 (which would be the first thread of my 2nd physical core) since Ryzen Master tells me that's my fastest core (with the 3rd core being my second fastest) and I noticed some minor improvement but I can't really tell if it was placebo or if it actually made a difference.

As for drivers, I was running version version 572.83 previously

Specifically because of all the complaints coming from people that updated to their latest drivers, though I haven't had issues with the latest one so far. Game ran the same both on old drivers and new drivers.

[matias93 7,535]

On 4/18/2025 at 5:48 PM, zyon2101 said:

On this screen, try changing the Output API from Direct3D 12 to version 11, as it looks you're using Windows 7, which is not compatible with later versions of DirectX.

[zyon2101 12]

5 hours ago, matias93 said:

On this screen, try changing the Output API from Direct3D 12 to version 11, as it looks you're using Windows 7, which is not compatible with later versions of DirectX.

Ah whoops, I guess I should've mentioned this but I am actually running Windows 10


The Windows 7 appearance comes from a program I use for styling called WindowBlinds, though I excluded the game from being styled by it to avoid any sort of compatibility issue.

[matias93 7,535]

You could still try with Direct3D 11, though, as the Direct3D 12 implementation of DgVoodoo2 has some bugs.