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).