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Showing results for tags 'radeon hd'.
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Having troubles with your brand new Radeon HD card?
ladehaug posted a topic in SC4 Bugs & Technical Issues
Hello all fellow Sim builders! I was surprised to see that after upgrading my graphics card to a Radeon HD7970 (one of the fastest cards around at the time being), Sim City did not perform as well as earlier. In game scrolling looked particularly bad (color changes and missing graphics while scrolling / zooming). Switching to software rendering fixed these rendering issues, but even with a processor running at 3.4 Ghz, the rendering speed was not as good as with my older graphics card. I searched the net and discovered that many others had the same problems with their Radeon cards as well. Could it really be that a brand new Radeon HD card is not up to the task? These newer cards are way better in every aspect compared to the fastest cards back in 2003, so this I could simply not belive. After some research I found the problem and was able to fix the issue. The game is old, and many of the graphics cards on the marked at the time it was created was not able to render graphics optimally with maximum settings. So, in an attempt to simplify things for the ordinary user, the programmers at Maxis implemented a number of rendering rules that set the recommended "standard graphics settings". Most of these settings can be changed in the graphics settings dialog in the game, but a few of the more "advanced" settings are not possible to change within the dialog. The good thing is that these settings (rules) can be found in a file in the system. By looking at these rules I soon discovered that the programmers at Maxis was setting some very strict rules and settings for almost all ATI cards (in order to prevent very slow performace). However, they did a mistake by potentially filtering out future Radeon cards as well. This is the reason for the poor hardware rendering quality with many Radeon cards today. To fix the issue: Open the file Graphics Rules.sgr in the Sim City 4 program file directory. It's a text file, so it can be opened in a text editor. Search for the text Radeon and verify that you see the following lines of text: partialRule "Radeon" stringMatch cardIdentity "*Radeon*" Replace the text *Radeon* with Dummy as indicated in red: partialRule "Radeon" stringMatch cardIdentity "Dummy" This will bypass the check for any Radeon cards for special treatment. Unchanged, it will treat any Radeon card as being slow by setting specific hardware render settings. Next, search for the text "Fast card" and verify that you see the following lines: partialRule "Fast card" -any # We run well on these cards, so up the defaults. stringMatch cardIdentity "NVidia*Geforce*" stringMatch cardIdentity "NVidia*Quadro*" stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI*9700*" stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI*8500*" stringMatch cardIdentity "Matrox*Parhelia*" stringMatch cardIdentity "*Radeon*" Add a new line as indicated in red. Important: Make sure that the asteriks are included! This wil treat any Radeon card as a fast card. Save the file and open Sim City 4. Go to graphics settings dialog and set standard. Everything will now be maxed out. Restart the game. I'm having a few issues when running the game in windowed mode, so I'd recommend running the game in full screen. For the convenience, I've added the modified file as an attachment. Remove (rename) the .txt in the file name before replacing the file in the game folder. I'd also recommend setting a few command line switches to ensure the stability on todays multi core cpu's. I'm using the following switches: -CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1200x32 -f -intro:Off -CPUCount:1 -EH:Off -CPUPriority:high Replace the red text with your monitors resolution. My monitor resolution is 1920x1200, and now everything runs very smoothly on my system -- Geir Graphics Rules.sgr.txt
