jarlow

Hey everyone, I think I've stumbled across a fix for the slowness with hardware rendering. Open "Graphics Rules.sgr" in your SimCity 4 directory and add the highlighted line, and remember to turn hardware rendering back on: property useSecondStage false # Default, overridden below in most cases. property texBindMaxFree 4 # To stop thrashing, plus a little pad. property dirtyRectMergeFrames 6 # Default, for low-end card. property TextureBits 32 # mostly just for preview -- everything else # should be DXT property usevertexbuffers false My hardware specs: Intel Core 2 quad-core Q9300 @ 2.5 GHz 8 GB RAM NVidia GeForce 8800 GT with 512 MB RAM Running windowed at 1920x1080. Before the fix, scrolling performance was about 1 FPS. After the fix it was significantly smoother, at least 20-30 FPS. Can other people give this a try and see if it works? Hardware rendering looks slightly better since better texture filtering is used (whereas software rendering uses nearest filtering which gives noticeable aliasing artifacts).

Originally posted by: Le Dragon Noir Thanks. That eliminates the slow down caused by the shadows. However there is still a slowdown caused by the option "city details". Where did you get that command/setting from?quote> I found usevertexbuffers by digging through a log that SimCity generated. On my machine the log lives in C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\simcity 4 deluxe\apps. The setting isn't a miracle setting that makes SimCity perform perfectly, but it does significantly improve scrolling performance to where I can actually play the game. I still get slowdowns when zooming and scrolling, although I believe this is due to it having to reload resources at the new zoom levels.

Yes, it should go in the Standard Hardware section. I didn't notice anything about back buffers in that file. However, when you run SimCity it'll generate a log in the executable directory (at least with the Steam version), and in that log is a dump of all its options and properties. That's how I found usevertexbuffers, so you may give the log a try to see if there's anything else useful to you.