Sim City 4 choppy on new Graphics cards

[acperience7]

On both of the new graphics cards I bought Sim City 4 is far more choppy when scrolling the map, and the music is choppy as well. My first card was a 9800Pro 128MB(shipped with the PC), and it ran Sim City 4 well. The troubles came when I got an X1650PRO 512MB, and now even on my X1950PRO 256MB. The game is not as smooth when scrolling around the map. It jumps frequently(choppy), and the music constantly skips(like a scrathed CD, but no reapeating syndrome). I never had this trouble on my 9800Pro. I thought that when I switched back to a card with a 256 bit bus things would be normal again. I did find a list of GPU's in the game folder. It doesn't list any X1K cards. I was thinking this may be the problem, but I don't know what to enter in the file.

File name="Video Cards.sgr":
#
# ID to video card mappings
#


vendor "3dfx" 0x1142 0x10d9 0x121a
card 0x0001 "Voodoo 1"
card 0x0002 "Voodoo 2"
card 0x0003 "Banshee"
card 0x0004 "Banshee"
card 0x0005 "Voodoo 3"
card 0x0007 "Voodoo 4"
card 0x0009 "Voodoo 5"
card 0x643d "Rush (Alliance)"
card 0x8626 "Rush (Macronix)"
end



vendor "ST Microelectronics" 0x104a
# Kyro, Kyro 2 etc. are all one card
card 0x0010 "Kyro"
end


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card 0x5056 "Rage 128 Pro"
card 0x5057 "Rage 128 Pro"
card 0x5058 "Rage 128 Pro"
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card 0x534e "Rage 128"
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card 0x5455 "Rage 128 Pro"
card 0x5654 "Mach 64"
card 0x5655 "Mach 64"
card 0x5656 "Mach 64"
end



vendor "3D Labs" 0x104c 0x10ba 0x3d3d 0x1048
card 0x0001 "GLiNT 300SX"
card 0x0002 "GLiNT 500TX"
card 0x0003 "GLiNT"
card 0x0005 "Permedia"
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card 0x000a "Permedia 3"
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card 0x0301 "Permedia 2"
card 0x1004 "Permedia"
card 0x3d04 "Permedia 2"
card 0x3d07 "Permedia 2"
card 0x8901 "GLiNT"
end


vendor "SiS" 0x1039
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card 0x0205 "6205"
card 0x0305 "305"
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card 0x6326 "6326"
end


vendor "S3" 0x5333
card 0x5631 "Virge"
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card 0x8812 "Trio 64"
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card 0x8c2a "SuperSavage 128 IX"
card 0x8c2b "SuperSavage 128 IX DDR"
card 0x8c2c "SuperSavage IX"
card 0x8c2d "SuperSavage IX DDR"
card 0x8c2e "SuperSavage IXC SDR"
card 0x8c2f "SuperSavage IXC DDR"
card 0x8d04 "ProSavage"
card 0x9102 "Savage 2000"
end


vendor "Matrox" 0x102b
card 0x0518 "Millennium"
card 0x0519 "Millennium"
card 0x051a "Mystique"
card 0x051b "Millennium II"
card 0x051f "Millennium II"
card 0x0520 "G200 PCI"
card 0x0521 "G200 AGP"
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card 0x1001 "G100 AGP"
card 0x1525 "Fusion G450"
card 0x1527 "Fusion G800"
card 0x2007 "Mistral"
card 0x2527 "G550"
end



vendor "NVidia" 0x10b4 0x12d2 0x10de
card 0x1b1d "Riva 128"
card 0x0008 "NV 1"
card 0x0009 "NV 1"
card 0x0010 "NV 2"
card 0x0018 "Riva 128"
card 0x0019 "Riva 128 ZX"
card 0x0020 "TNT"
card 0x0028 "TNT2"
card 0x0029 "TNT2 Ultra"
card 0x002a "TNT2"
card 0x002b "TNT2"
card 0x002c "TNT Vanta"
card 0x002d "TNT2 M64"
card 0x002e "TNT Vanta"
card 0x002f "TNT Vanta"
card 0x00a0 "TNT2 Aladdin"
card 0x0100 "GeForce 256"
card 0x0101 "GeForce 256 DDR"
card 0x0102 "GeForce 256 Ultra"
card 0x0103 "GeForce 256 Quadro"
card 0x0110 "GeForce2 MX"
card 0x0111 "GeForce2 MX DDR"
card 0x0112 "GeForce2 Go"
card 0x0113 "GeForce2 Quadro"
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card 0x0175 "GeForce4 Go 420"
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vendor "Intel" 0x8086
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card 0x7123 "810"
card 0x7125 "810e"
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card 0x2562 "845"
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vendor "VideoLogic" 0x1033
card 0x0046 "PowerVR"
card 0x0067 "PowerVR2"
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vendor "Trident" 0x1023
card 0x8420 "CyberBlade i7"
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card 0x939A "Cyber9397 DVD"
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card 0x9930 "CyberBlade XPm"
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vendor "Number Nine" 0x105d
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card 0x5348 "Revolution IV"
end


vendor "Cirrus" 0x1013
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vendor "Rendition" 0x1163
card 0x0001 "Verite 1000"
card 0x2000 "Verite 2100"
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vendor "Chromatic" 0x110b
card 0x0004 "MPact"
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vendor "Weitek" 0x100e
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card 0x9100 "P9100"
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vendor "Compaq" 0x0e11
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vendor "Digital" 0x1011
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vendor "Tseng Labs" 0x100c
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card 0x4702 "ET6300"
end

 

[Darren]

Apart from updating ATI drivers to the latest one, there is not much you can do. Perhaps modded drivers, Omega drivers?

Sim's 4 is a very low spec game, you shouldn't be getting lag at all, but you mentioned skipping in sound, this indicates a CPU bottleneck more than a graphical one, and P4 Prescotts are more than crappy for today's standards.

 

[Widjaja]

P4's aren't more than crappy.
They are capable of some games depending on what you play.
I can tell you now, it is holding the performance of your GPU back.

Anyway.

Yes I know about the choppiness.
These cards do this with certain games which are more CPU bound.
Generally older games too.

 

[Basard]

I had the EXACT same problem, the problem is ATI cards. I had an x800 for the longest time, running on a 4000+, I ran the game with a nvidia card and its absolutely flawless now. If theres one thing I know for sure, it's that SC4 does NOT work for crap with ATI cards, no matter what drivers you have, Omega or not, I tried them all. Run it in software mode man, it will always be faster than an ATI card, even if its 2900XT's in crossfire, it will run like crap. Put any nvidia card in there and it will run perfectly. As long as it above a Geforce4 or so. The difference between an ATI card and Nvidia card on the same system will be greater than night and day.

 

[NinkobEi]

I use an ati card and Sim city 4 works great with me. just dont try using maximum detail/pedestrians..etc and max aa. there's just too many things for your CPU to render

 

[Widjaja]

Here's an example of ATi vs nVidia on a game.
The Sims 2 I used a 7600GS which ran pretty smooth still choppy with max settings but didn't cope when there were alot of NPCs.
ATi X1950pro copes well with more NPC's but pauses so too much as soon as textures and shadows are set to high.

So it's an optimiztaion issue for ATi's latest cards with certain games.

 

[pt]

i ran simcity 4 in a 9800pro, x1800gto, and a hd2600xt, and on all it ran fine without no skipping, at high detail

 

[AsRock]

P4's aren't more than crappy.
They are capable of some games depending on what you play.
I can tell you now, it is holding the performance of your GPU back.

Anyway.

Yes I know about the choppiness.
These cards do this with certain games which are more CPU bound.
Generally older games too.

Ran fine for me with a P2.4 ATI 9600XT well that was untill the city was massive and they were BIG!.

Tryed turning off AA and AF just for the sake of it ?. i'd try it on my 2900 but got rid of the game a looong time ago and some days i wish i had not lol.

 

[Basard]

The game always runs fine, until the city gets big, but I ran a big city with my ATI card, then as soon as I put the 7950 in, I tried the same city out, and it ran fine. It's got a lot to do with cpu, too. Sim City 3 and 4 ran kinda garbagish on pretty much any system, along with the sims... they just don't seem to be written well at all, fun, but not written well.

The Sims 1, on my grannies computer, still runs like crap, with a gig of RAM, and an AthlonXP 2500, with a 6200 series Nvidia. I've seen the sims run, very slowly, on a 133Mhz pentium, with 32mb of RAM, it still ran though... Puttin it on such a superior machine such as grannies should have made it run flawlessly, but it seems like, since those types of games rely so heavily on scripts, you need dual quad cores just to run them smoothly. One reason it runs like crap on grannies computer is that it has ALL the expansion packs on it, and about a million houses and families (she loves the sims). Any time you buy one of these maxis games, you may as well accept the fact that they usually run poorly. The last maxis game I owned that ran smoothly was SimCity2000, haha.

It's mostly cpu for SimCity4 though, having a Nvidia card helps though, I guess, It helped me out a lot. Google "simcity 4 choppy on ATI" and see what you find....

 

[pt]

it doesn't happen on the last simcity (societes) but the game has nothing to do with the old series, and i rly dk why it's called a simcity if Maxis didn't do it

 

[Basard]

I was kinda curious about societies.... but I forgot to look it up, sad that its not made by maxis. Maxis is good, it just seems like their games always run a lot slower than they should. But if you get a system thats "just right" they will run flawlessly I guess. Hopefully societies will actually have some hardware support, it's pretty much mandatory these days.

 

[pt]

it runs decently fine on my hd2600 mobile
fun game but i wouldn't call it a simcity, more like a big sims city

 

[imperialreign]

Sim's 4 is a very low spec game, you shouldn't be getting lag at all, but you mentioned skipping in sound, this indicates a CPU bottleneck more than a graphical one, and P4 Prescotts are more than crappy for today's standards.

Just my two cents . . . but on a system that's setup well, a Pentium 4 is still capable of playing modern games at a decent rate (I can manage an average 24FPS in Crysis at 1280x768 single GPU with all settings high and no AA/AF).

Honestly, the first thing I would do would be to do an optimized defrag of the HDD.

Also, make sure you don't have any anti-virus, anti-malware software running in the background.

Make sure to check that your audio drivers are current and up to date, too.

If you can, and feel up to it, go into the system BIOS and check to see if you have a setting for "PCI Latency". If so, you can bump it up a step, that might help the audio processor keep an enough extra BUS bandwidth to handle it's work.

 

[acperience7]

I think I found the problem, I have a replacement MotherBoard on order. I think I damaged my 478 Socket a while back, I didn't think of it at the time I posted this thread. I'll see how things go in about 5 days. Thanks for all the reply's. And my 9800 and X1650 with a 3.0 P4 ran the game fine too, but like I said I forgot about the socket damage during my X1650's service time. Hope my CPU doesn't get hurt if it gets pulled out with the heatsink again. I think I'll cry, or have a breakdown if I mess something else up on this PC.

 

[Andi64]

I have the same problem, SimCity 4 runs like crap on ATi cards (X1K, HD series). This is what I found:

Test Systems:
AMD Phenom X4 9850 BE
4x1GB DDR2-800 C4
MSI K9A2 Platinum
320GB SATA2 WD
OCZ Evostream 720W
Windows XP 32b SP3

Intel Core2 Quad Q6600
2x2GB DDR2-800 C5
MSI P35 Neo2 FR
320GB SATA2 Hitachi
Topower 550W
Windows Vista Ultimate 64b

I've tried several drivers with ATi cards.
With a X1800XT and HD3870 the game is unplayable on both systems, wich are completely different. With a 9800PRO, 7900GT and 8800GT the game runs perfectly fine on both systems, without doing a single change but swaping the cards (and drivers if needed).

What I found:
I can't play SimCity on ATi cards. I didn't tried to lower the in-game graphics quality, it should run with everything on max... it's an old game.

I wanted to buy an HD4850, but I often play SimCity

 

[pepsi71ocean]

Sim CIty 4 is a very intensive game for a computer. It is the only game i know that can tax a Quad core processor, Ram, and a video card. I have SC4 running on both my old.

Did you update to SP1 from SC4 Update?

Oh and you most likely will have better luck at this website here http://www.simtropolis.com
That's all that website does is modifications and what not for Sim City and now newer stuff as well.

 

[beyond_amusia]

I've never seen a system that can run SC4 perfectly, which sucks because I love SC4

 

[DrPepper]

Try increasing the pagefile. It helped me reduce stuttering and the scrolling issue needs to be patched it only happens with ATI cards.

 

[pepsi71ocean]

sc4 is a demanding game. Your page file should be around 3x the size of your ram.

 

[DrPepper]

Just for good measure I tried to use a 40gb hard drive as a page file as an experiment not much improvement over 8gb.

 

[pepsi71ocean]

well i noticed a huge jump when i set mine to 3x the size of my ram, but if you have more than 4GB's it shouldn't be needed unless you exceed 3.5GB's worth of plugins.

If you have a heavily modded game then remember that the amount of plugins you have will be loaded into your ram, and then your page file. so if you have 2GB's of ram, on a Vista PC and lets say 2.5GB's of plugins, then the first 512 goes to the os, then the next 1.5GB's goes to the game, and the remaining 1GB goes to the page file. That's how it was explained to me anyways.

 

[Widjaja]

I believe the issue here is with the X1xxx and up ATi cards having an issue with the textures and shadows in Sim City 4.

My 7600GS and 8800GT did not have these issues.

Probably Driver or Hardware related issue with ATi.

Don't know what the game run like on the HD4850 yet.

 

[supec]

I found that during Simcity 4 gameplay my HD3850 doesn't switch to 3D mode (higher core clock and GDDR clock).
So I overclocked it permanently in Rivatuner. Game is a bit smoother, but it doesn't help much. It's a great game, but awfully optimized. It seems to stress CPU pretty much, but graphic card seems to be without load for most of the time.

 

[DrPepper]

I found that during Simcity 4 gameplay my HD3850 doesn't switch to 3D mode (higher core clock and GDDR clock).
So I overclocked it permanently in Rivatuner. Game is a bit smoother, but it doesn't help much. It's a great game, but awfully optimized. It seems to stress CPU pretty much, but graphic card seems to be without load for most of the time.

I find its more of a Ram and HDD related thing in my experience. I wonder why it doesn't switch to 3d though. Going to give it a try.

 

[pepsi71ocean]

I find its more of a Ram and HDD related thing in my experience. I wonder why it doesn't switch to 3d though. Going to give it a try.

Its because sim city came out before the age of modern graphics cards. it will stress the rest of your system to the max, but i do think that upping your 2d clocks will help with game play.

between that and overclocked bus speeds betwqeen your ram cpu and gfx card will help.