Mayonator

Originally posted by: Screwballl Try switching it to software rendering. I have found this fixes it on almost all newer computers that I have played it on... since your system uses a PCI Express bridge for the graphics, SC4 being an older game cannot use that properly so it causes lag and stuttering.quote> Software rendering fixed the choppiness for me. I, too, have seen the choppiness on new Core 2 Duo hardware on Vista 32/64 with powerful nVidia Quadro cards. I didn't realize it was due to the PCI Express bus. Thanks for the info.

I recently obtained a rather powerful desktop machine: Intel Xeon 5150 (2.66ghz 4mb cache version of core 2 duo), 256MB NVIDIA Quadro 3500, 1GB PC 5300 ram. I was curious to see how fast SC 4 would handle a very large city I have, appx. 300,000 population, huge region, largest possible size city that was bogging down my old Athlon 64. Oh, btw, the new system is running Vista 32 bit. Time in the game absolutely flies -- I have set it on the first ">" speed to get a reasonable rate. But when I zoom out and scroll, it's choppy! Maybe 5-6fps. What could be causing this? This machine is very powerful. (I'm running with all settings maxed out at 1600x1200, with hw rendering. Switching to sw rendering helps a tiny bit.) Am I being memory limited? Is it Vista? Any other ideas? Thanks! Mayonator

I have tried the suggestions here without any improvements in smoothness. But I think I've tracked down the problem: poor memory performance. I've run at least four seperate memory benchmarking utilities, and all show my memory throughput running at about 20% efficiency (~2GB/sec). PC5300 (DDR2) at 667MHz with two channels should be closer to 10GB/sec. I can't explain these results, but at least it would seem to explain the choppy scrolling (when lots of graphics and textures must surely be read from memory.) I noticed that once I reached the edge of a town, scrolling smoothness improved vastly as long as I continued scrolling out of town; as soon as I reversed direction, the choppiness returned.

Originally posted by: N_O_Body Since you are running server hardware, why not run server software. Pick up a copy of MS Server 2005 or better, and try it with your screen set up as an XP (maybe Vista if it is there) workstation. You can also add 3GB and the server may give you a total of 3GB if you need it. Also set your paging file to some nice big size, like 4096MB. You may also be hanging problems with your video system. Since you have big, fast CPU's try software rendering.quote> I do have some copies of Win 2003 server and Win XP 64 lying around, and I was planning on giving those a spin. It would be nice to add more memory to the machine, but I am limited to 1GB at the moment. And I did consider the same logic, i.e., software rendering might be better because of a fast CPU, but I do not actually see a difference with sw rendering mode. When I get back to the box I'll try both prince_of_sims' suggestion and running it under XP/2003.

Originally posted by: prince_of_sims I use XP, so I don't know how much of this will apply. Open up Device Manager (don't know if it exists in Vista or not). Right-click the device (in your case, the display adapter) and go to Properties. Click the Details tab. Device Instance ID should be selected. Read the property in the box. There should only be one. Look for the words DEV_ and a string of four numbers after it. This is your device's hardware ID. Write it down somewhere. Now, open up Video Cards.sgr, which is located in Maxis\SimCity 4\, in Notepad (any text editor works). Find the section for the vendor of your card (ATI, nVidia, etc.) and go to the end of that section. Following the pattern in the file, enter in the device ID of your card, along with the name of it. That's it! It should work now.quote> Thanks..won't have a chance to try this for a few days, but I'm looking forward to giving it a shot.

Originally posted by: prince_of_sims I solved my lagging scroll times by manually adding the card's internal hardware ID into Video Cards.sgr. If you want more info on doing that, let me know.quote> Yes, I would like to know how you did this. Thanks.

I suspect video too. My video card is not typically used for game playing. Perhaps it just hasn't been tested with things like SC4. But I will try to install Win XP on this machine before giving up. Who knows what kind of stuff DX10 is doing under the covers.

Yes..I've been playing SC for a while. I bought my last desktop PC in 2004 specifically to run SimCity 4 - and had a lot of fun with it for a few months, but then stopped playing when my PC could no longer handle my largest cities as well as I liked.