Huge Lag on Monster System

[OM3N1R]

Hi guys. First Post  , and I want to say how much I enjoy this site! I hope I can find a solution to my problem.

So my old Graphics card crashed (8800 GTS) after 2 and a half years. Always played SC4 without much problems, although it did get laggy when I made huge cities. Other relevant specs

Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz
Windows XP Custom

So I got a new ATi 5770 today, and it puts any modern game to shame, but SC4 is like insaaanely slow. 1 second lag, 1 second play, 1 second lag etc. It is basically unplayable!

I do use over a gig of plugins (thanks to this site!  ), but that didn't cause much problem before. I just don't see how it could be running this much worse with a new and vastly superior graphics card?!

Any ideas are appreciated!

[gabrielbyrnei]

Im having a pretty similar issue, just upgraded to a new Athlon II 630 ( 4 cores, 2.8 Ghz) and have 2 Gbs of ram. Playing big city tiles is just impossible. Ive tried reeucing the plugins size to just 800 mbs, but still, very very slow simulation.


This is under Linux and Windows 7 alike.

[Strategist01]

Have you set your video rendering to "hardware" and not "software" under the graphics options? (that's the one with the computer screen) There is also something else...it was that SC4 can't be rendered if you have SLI editing on or somethign like that, it too old. Somebody else who knows what I'm talking about will have to help you on that one.

[gabrielbyrnei]

Either way, Software for Linux and Hardware for Windows 7, i get horrible simulation speeds. Also, I have only 1 PCIe card, so no SLI or Crossfire.

[z]

Do you people use DatPacker?  That's just a pretty wild guess, but it's been known to speed up many aspects of the game that you wouldn't necessarily expect.  Otherwise, it's hard to understand why the game is running so slowly.  I'm running on Windows 7 with an ATI 4870 and a 4 GB plugins folder, and the game runs faster than ever for me.

[gabrielbyrnei]

Yup, i played with a datpacked plugins, I have like 15 datpacked files. Biggest one like 300 Mbs

[westamastaflash]

Try turning off shadows, they were causing major lag for me.

[gabrielbyrnei]

Tried with every setting on the lowest possible, still very very slow. IMO, problem comes from simulation, and not really graphics. Makes no real difference on speed when playing on High setting than Low.

[Gringamuyloca]

Just a thought... or two... or 3 

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling SC4?... I've had to do that even after mucking with system display settings. You say you've changed the graphics card, so I would try this first.(You can uninstall and keep your "Plug Ins")

I  use to run on XP...always made a big difference if I put my Norton 360 in "Silent" mode...(which I still do on this Vista system, it never fails, as soon as I fire up the game , Norton wants to defrag, scan or update something!!) (Another thing I noticed, is almost without fail, Norton 360 coming out of "silent mode" will crash my game!)

The other thing could be conflicts in your plug ins... but you say you're using packed dats, which can catch a lot of stuff... unless you're like me and are messing around with the new PIMX toy and moving files in and out and up and down and around and then in a glance at the file size realize the plug in folder has almost grown by a 1/3  (Things went a lot smoother when I realized I only needed one of the 2 copies of Peg.dat)

I hope we can find a solution for you!!

[Haljackey]

That's the thing with SC4, it will suck everything your PC has regardless of how "good" or "bad" it is. 

The only thing that will help is adding RAM.  Other system power will be sucked dry by this computer game.

[gabrielbyrnei]

Its not very logical that it behaves like that, being almost a 10 year old game with not such great graphics.

[westamastaflash]

Well think about it like this - The game has got a ton of math to do, and individual core speeds really haven't increased much in the past 10 years - we've got around it with faster buses, better caches, and dual/quad cores with parallel processing. For things like pathfinding and destination finding, these are processor intensive tasks that are linear in nature - branch prediction may help a little but depending on how they are implemented in the code...

Simcity 4 contains its own process scheduler, which is *not* enabled for parallel cores/processors. Since its a 32 bit app it will only be able to handle a max of ~ 2 gb of ram. I found that running in a window seems somewhat faster than running in full screen (granted, I've got 2 monitors, 22" and 23" each), and also that datpacking your plugins helps too.

Since your Athalon is only 2.8ghz per core, you're only going to get 1 of the 4 cores for Simcity 4... Sorry I can't be of more help. What was your processor before this?

[gabrielbyrnei]

It was a Phenom 9500 (Quad Core 2.2 Ghz).

Even overclocking the Athlon II 630 from 2.8 to 3.3 Ghz makes no noticiable differences.

[westamastaflash]

Dang. I wish I could help more, but I'm fresh out of ideas. Simcity 4 is using 25% CPU (1 core) fully while running? Have you tried disabling sound and running in a window?

[z]

SC4 will always fully use one core of a CPU when running.  It's the GUI that's responsible for this; it apparently cycles through idle loops when it has nothing better to do.

[gabrielbyrnei]

If i restrict SC4 to only 1 core then yeah, ill get 100% usage from that core.

If i dont restrict it, then SC4 will use 100% of all four cores, ovbiously it was not designed for multithreading.

[gabrielbyrnei]

Another odd fact, when eventually im patient enough to wait for anything to grow, when its built, it takes ages for it, supposing this is a residential building, to actually have people travelling from it to their Jobs. This most of times makes the building abandon, saying commute time was too long.

[cody426]

Sorry to bring up an old thread, but I have been playing around with my machine since the thread appeared and decided I would give some input on my system and what I think has solved most my slow/crashing issues.  When I started to play SC4 I had no problems, but as the region I have been working with for over 2 years grew to over 1.5 million sims things started to go downhill.

My system

CPU:    Intel Core i7 920 2.67GHz
MB:     Asus Rampage II Gene
RAM:   12GB Corsiar XMS 1333 (6 X 2GB)
Video:  (2) Asus 9800GTX+ DK running in SLI
HD:     OCZ Vertex Turbo Solid State Drive
OS:     Windows XP x64

I had similar issues with my old system (athlon 64 X2 4400+, 7800GT, 2GB RAM, Raptor 10K Drive) and I positive that it was my HD that was failing.  After days of testing the drive I determined that nothing was wrong with it but I still had the mindset that it had something to do with disk read/write.  So with the new system I installed the SSD thinking that would fix my issue for sure.  It did not, the game ran better and the load times are incredible, but I would still have crashes and/or slowness.  Eventually I just stopped playing the game, the region I was working on was huge and I could not get anything done (and was discouraged from starting a new one) without being booted from the game or it being so slow.  I would loose interest or get inpatient and crash it trying to do things wile it was "stuttering". 

My plugins folder is 2.56GB and a MESS, no dat packing and many folders.  My mind kept wandering to read/write problems being the main cause of my issue, as looking at the performance monitor the amount of writes to disk would skyrocket when zooming, moving, plopping....  anything really accept for just running the simulator.  I started to look into how windows treats and accesses files and came up with a few ideas. 

Eventually it led me to this site; http://kadaitcha.cx/performance.html 

I applied Tweak #2, #3 and #4.  I do not think that #3 would make any difference, but #2 and #4 make sense.  They will help lower the amount of read/writes to disk.  I was wanting to put together a much better report for everyone showing my exact specs, driver versions, disk usage, ect... in and out of the game.  Since applying these tweaks (two weeks ago) I have been playing the game for 2 - 4 hours a day, with only one crash!  I have not had time to put a better report together for good reason, I am back to playing with every free minute I have.  The girlfriend is not real happy about it but I am relieved...  I was afraid the hundreds of hours (probably thousands) I had put in my game were to go to waste.  One of these days I plan on getting the region finished up and maybe a MD, but for now I am off to play.

The tweaks listed on the site may not apply for every machine, and if you have a different OS there are links to those as well.  These tweaks could cause major issues so backup the registry and write down any commands executed so they can be reversed.

I hope this helps someone, because this problem almost ruined this game for me, and it is my favorite game.

-Cody

[gabrielbyrnei]

Thank you for that really detailed post of yours.

Problem is, i tried the game on both, Windows 7 and Linux, so those tweaks arent effective


How can i test for drive failures on windows 7 ?

[cody426]

How can i test for drive failures on windows 7 ?

I usually use the program from the manufacturer.  So if your drive is a seagate you would use "seatools for windows"

there are some third party drive diagnostic tools out there but I am not familiar with any particular one.