   Sim City 4 Performance
  I have an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8 GHz) 1GB of ramand Nvidia GeForce 6800. When I run Sim City 4 it runs pretty smoothly with all the settings on high.  But every time i move the map it slows down a bit for a second, and as the city lingers around populations in the tens of thousands, there is definetly a noticeable slow down.  So I was just wondering, is there anyone out there with good enough system specs to run Sim City 4 Perfectly smoothly? because I dream of one day buying a high end computer and running simcity on it, but  I was afraid I might be let down because the game simply might be inherently slow.   
  Never played it, but I assume those slow downs are HDD reads and loading new textures, models and stuff for what new buildings or whatever that are being displayed as you scroll. A faster harddriver should help with the stutering, but it seems that this kind of seldom stuters are common to modern games.   ;  Sim City 4 is painfully chunky, even on my 3.2 ghz, 512 RAM, ATI x1600 machine.  It's the stream-loading.  Defragging can help minimize loading slowdown, but other than that you're pretty much hosed :)On a related note, every time I updated my computer one of the first tests I would always run was to see if the slow-ass engine of Ultima IX would finally run on it.  The final machine I was able to test it on was a GeForce2 GTS 128MB DDR video card, 1.8 ghz processor, and 512 MB of RAM.  And it was still slow.  Unfortunately I may never know how much power it takes to run, as the new ATI cards won't run it :(;  I've seen Sim City 4 take down a dual Xeon before so it's not terribly surprising that it chokes your puny little single-core AMD64. [wink]Seriously, though, it is an enormous performance hog. Simcity 3000 was bad enough (chokes my puny little single-core AMD64 3000+ whenever the town gets big enough) but 4000 just takes it to a whole new level of insanity.Anyway, you probably don't need to upgrade; scour the web for tweak guides and see if there's some obnoxious option enabled by default that you don't need.   ;  I think a big part of the performance hogging is is memory usage, the mip-maps of all of the different buildings from all of the different angles.  Get about 4GB of RAM and a gig or two of video RAM and see what happens :)   ;Quote:Original post by JBourrieOn a related note, every time I updated my computer one of the first tests I would always run was to see if the slow-ass engine of Ultima IX would finally run on it.  The final machine I was able to test it on was a GeForce2 GTS 128MB DDR video card, 1.8 ghz processor, and 512 MB of RAM.  And it was still slow.  Unfortunately I may never know how much power it takes to run, as the new ATI cards won't run it :(Really?  What Catalyst drivers are you using, and what exactly is wrong?  Because I've managed to finally get Ultima IX running smoothly at 1600x1200 at full settings.  (BTW, it might help if you increased the amount of RAM.  512 is kind of low).   ;  dummy me. Almost purchased SC4K for my PIV 1.5Ghz 512RAM   ;  Civ4 is even worse than SimCity 4.Even the newest patch still has a memory leak bug, which makes it that much worse.   