Peteri

Hello people, I've been a member real long but never really posted. Anyway, I used to run Simcity 4 on this rig Intel Pentium 4 2.85Ghz 1GB DDR 333MHz RAM nVidia FX5500 Windows XP 1.5GB Paging File Recently I upgraded my computer to play the newer titles like Oblivion and all so Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83Ghz 2GB DDR2 800MHZ RAM ATI Radeon X1900XT Windows XP 3GB Paging File I've been reading the forums throughly to see if anyone has had the same problem but no luck yet. There was some mention of Simcity 4 not understanding the newer systems and I seem to be experiencing it. The game used to run better on the older system and had virtually no lag in a city under 50,000. This new system has very choppy graphics. First thing I did was changed the renderer from hardware to software and it helped quite a bit. Then I turned off vertical sync through the ATI utility, left Anisotropic and Anti-Aliasing as application specified. I'm running everything at High at 1280x1024 and the game is incredibly unresponsive. When I bump it down to all Low or 1024x768, it performs better but the menu is still somewhat unresponsive. I have set CPU affinity to CPU 0 but someone posted set to CPU 1 and I haven't tried that yet. Does anyone know how I can get the game to run smoothly again? Or will I have to wait for Simcity 5? Thanks all!

Quick update, I recently reinstalled the game on my desktop and set video rendering to 16bpp and software mode. The game runs perfectly fine with everything on and only shadows and # of cars/sim on low. I went to the .cfg files in the game directory itself and just fiddled with the values here and there, making sure that SoftwareRendering = true. Game rocks now! No lag with a 500MB plugin folder.

Well my laptop is running a mobility card so the drivers are different. I'm pretty sure it's not running Cat7.2 but I'm not sure what it's running. Well I've tried everything, including disabling every modern graphics card features, fiddling with vertical sync and all. I found out that everything medium settings, 16-bit colour mode at software rendering, I can possibly play the game the odd thing is that I have to scroll through the entire city once to let all the graphics load up or something. Then the lag is mostly gone but I still get stutters now and then. I think I'll just stick to playing this on my laptop in a well cooled environment. Thanks people.

Thanks guys! Really appreciate the detailed replies and you people taking the time to help me out. I'm currently running ATI Catalyst 7.2, the latest version of the drivers. I'm not very sure why rolling back drivers would be a good idea because I thought the new versions would have what's in the old versions? Correct me if I'm wrong. The precise term to use would be that my graphics are stuttering. My C2D is the lowest end clocking in at 1.83GHz only but I mean it's a C2D, it should definitely be able to take it. The odd thing is I'm trying it on my laptop and it works pretty fine at medium and 1024x768, no lag or stutter. Intel Centrino 1.6GHz 512MB DDR333 RAM ATI 7500 Mobility 32MB RAM 768MB Paging file. Just a few BATs and Lots installed nothing too big yet.. I've got Patch 2, and latest drivers for everything. I'll go try figuring out the graphics settings and searching around the drivers. In any case I've got a better idea on how to fix this. Thanks people!