Well, im getting very very slow playing speed on Big city tiles, even with low populations of 100k, things get really slow.
This is on an AMD Athlon II 630 (3.0Ghz) and 2 Gb of DDR2 ram. Ive tested on both, Windows 7 and Linux. Even leaving my plugins folder with only 800 Mb, playing big tiles is impossible.
is that a dual-core CPU? If so, try restricting the game to only one core . What is graphics card do you have in your computer?
How does the game cope with large cities without any plugins whatsoever?
In fact its a quad-core, i have an ATI HD2600 XT as graphics card.
I have to try it with absolutely no plugins. Least ive tried is only residential and NAM in my plugins.
Just tried with ONLY NAM on my plugins, it was a bit faster, but nowhere near of what im expecting. Even a mere 100k population makes it sluggish simulation
Try turning shadows to Low - this seems to be the number one cause of slow games. Once I changed shadows to low my games are faster than ever (Win7 x64, Core2Duo e8400 OC3.6ghz, 6GB ram). With shadows on, the speed is terribly slow. I also run the game in a window with the following command line options:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -intro:off -audio:off -w -CustomResolution:enabled -r1440x900x32
Yup, i have shadows lowest possible. Tried EVERYTHNG on low, including 16 Bit colours, but still very very slow.
Do you have enough HDD space for your swapfile? Also, try turning off "real-time" antivirus protection as sometimes scans are slow.
Microsoft's Sysinternals Process Explorer can help view your CPU usage while the game is running (in a window). See if something else may be conflicting...
This happens on Linux as on Windows aswell. Linux ofcouse doesent use any kind of antivirus,spyware,etc. Swap file on Linux is 2Gb's and Windows 7's swapfile is 2Gb's aswell.