I would like to know your experiences on running SC4 on new/modern HW:
- New CPUs are mostly Duo or Quad. I think this is quite discussed already.
- Almost all new screens are sized 16:10 rather than 4:3. Any problems with this?
- Also many (I would say most) motherboards currently come with an on-board graphics card. In older designs these were basic and slow chips, suitable only for non-demanding applications like i-net or office automation. But new motherboards tend to have much more featured onboard graphics cards. Anyone using such a card? Please note that I never had any powerfull card, I only bought basic graphics cards costing no more than €50-60.
From what I gathered, the problems with dual/quad core CPUs are mainly caused by bad drivers, rather than the technology itself. SimCity is one of the few games that actually makes use of multiple CPUs (and for Windows, a dual core CPU is basically two CPUs). Personally, I'd buy a "top brand" mainboard, such as ASUS - those never failed my expectations so far. AMD CPUs seem to be less affected from stability problems when it comes to SC4.
As for the graphics card, any low-end card will do for SC4. I'd say that basically every on-board graphics will work fine as well, at least if it comes with an ATI or nVidia GPU. The latter one might be preferrable, since many ATI users have reported problems with their cards. By using a " -CustomResolution:enabled -r...x..." addition to the shortcut, SC4 will run fine in widescreen mode, just make sure that your graphics card is capable of running the the resolution that you selected.
I had SC4 working on my laptop - which had a intergrated ATI x200 in it and SC4 worked fine. Right now, I run SC4 in 1650 x 1024 resolution with a ati 3850 and again, no issues. We'll see what issues crop up when I go core i7 in January. :)