Originally posted by: Traveller
One problem you have is your useing Vista. That one is hard to work around if your committed to keep useing that turkey. But at a more basic level SC4 engine is at this point a little behind the times. Its preformance on modern systems if properly optimized and configured ranges from decent to semi-acceptable. The SC4 engine on larger cities\regions tends to get very busy and while for example, I find its prefromance acceptable, for the system I have, its hardly stellar. Though, keep in mind, dense cites with 1.0+ million sims and 1gb+ of mods, tons of detailed lots will do that. One thing that may help however, is go into your display options and see how the game is handling rendering. This is very important. If its useing HARDWARE, switch it to software, or vice-versa. That single setting has a major impact on sc4 preformance. Try both settings and determine which one is the dud setting(your mileage may very, ati cards for example preform well in software but suck in HW.) Another suggestion, is set shadows to low(if its not allready). Im not really sure how swapping drivers around is going to help that much, long as there recent and properly installed, it shouldnt really matter a great deal what version your useing. SC4 wont use any of the newer features or opimtizations of either ATI or NVidias drivers anyhow. The underlying bloatware Vista, is something else entirely however. Ive upgraded several iterations of ATI drivers and truth be told, preformance for me at any rate, has neither measureably decreased or increased. The last thing you should be made aware of, is SC4 does not recognize ANY of our newer video cards. There is a trick to get the game to actually recognize and use the actual card that is in your PC. You need to modify Video cards.sgr and graphics rules.sgr. After doing this I did get a boost in overall smoothness(though again the game is still no speed demon) Search this forum I beleive or the entire site and you will find the thread on how to do this.quote>
Yeah Vista is the main problem, XP is faster and i do have dual boot, the only problem is XP crashes all the dam time (yeh i think i need a reinstall). Ive never really had Simcity4 working good if im honest, with my old XP2500 computer and ATI grapics it seemed "ok" and this was with Win98ME, as soon as i got a A64 3200, WinXP and Nvidia 7800 it got slower. Then my Current X2 4400 caused constant crashes and adding a Nvidia 8800gtx made it even slower!
With Vista64bit, ive only had 2 BSOD/crashes since i installed it, im loving the stability that XP32bit never had for me but almost nothing works right with it. Simcity 4 nope, Navyfield sort of works, and a few others dont work right at all. What does work however is Simcity 2000-64!!! Its really wierd playing that again.
I need to find these threads about video and graphic rules . I understand i add my graphics card hardware string to the list in the video.svg file but im not sure where/what i would put it in the graphics rules.sgr
What i've tried so far:
forcing Single core by imagecfg
forcing high priority (was in same guide as imagecfg)
Software/Hardware (software caused lots of box's and screenfreezes)
Lower resolution and 16bit/32bit combanations + Windowed mode etc
turning off color curser, and other options in simcity.
none of those have worked
AMD X2 4400
Nvidia 8800GTX 185 drivers @ 1680x1050x32 resolution.
2gig ram maybe on the short side for Vista 64 but theres still 40% free when SC4 is running.
