Sim City 4

I'm here again, with problems

I just bought the Deluxe Edition of Sim City 4 which comes with 2 CDs. It all installed perfectly, slower than I expected but when I got to play it, I get a really bad lag . I wasn't expecting as my computer has quite good specs.

Intel Pentium 4
3Ghz Processor
1 GB RAM
256 x600 ATI graphics card (it may not be that good but I should still be able to play this game on high graphics, shouldn't I?)
And I guess that's what matters. I updated the game, updated my drivers as well, to catalyst 6.12. I can play games such as BF2 and B&W 2 on medium settings without any lag at all.

Hmm, any suggestions?

 

A lot of people have reported it lags horribly. Your specs are more than adequate.

All I can suggest is basic stuff like uninstalling and reinstalling, and making sure you don't have AntiVirus and other unnecessary programs running in the background.

Also, what version of DirectX do you have, and try running the Diagnostic Tool (Start, Run and type in dxdiag)

If you're using XP, ATI have Catalyst 6.3 drivers available from HERE.

 

Updated to catalyst 6.13. Yes, I'm running win xp and I have DirectX 9.0 installed.
Would that be a possible problem as The Sims manual only mentions about DirectX 8.1?

 

i agree with imsomniac... reinstall and the link he gave you was to catalyst 6.3 and you have 6.13.... so update that and repost!

oh and as for the DX problem... 9.0 is a newer and better version so you should be good!

 

Yes, they were 6.3, I made a mistake in that post. I reinstalled 2 times but it's still not fixed.

I was wondering, would the Omega drivers make any difference? Is it worth trying?

 

I have a p4 3ghz ATI 1800xl AIW, 1.5gb ram and striped sata drives. Simcity 4 runs like mollases uphill in winter. My dinky onboard vga card played it better than this ati card did before i fixed it ... and i fixed it pretty good too!

Here is how:

1) Curse loudly at your computer for about 45 seconds to a minute (make sure no offendable ears are w/in earshot) for making you have to go through this foolishness to get a 3 year old + game to work properly.

2) Uninstall the cat 6.x drivers. Rip them out, use ati's remover tool after you are done, you want these drives GONE!!!! http://www2.ati.com/drivers/cat-uninstaller.exe

3) delete c:\ati and good riddance

4) Download and install the cat v 5.13 drivers, https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27
newer versions may work but this is the one i KNOW works.

I don't know what ati has changed in these dam drivers but they need to change it back becuase this sucks. I can't use any of the multimedia features or the new encoder .. anything because my favorite game doesn't work. I BOUGHT the stupid 1800 to play SC 4 better!!

SC4 will work much more quickly, but not as fast as it really should considering the horsepower of some of these high falutin ati video cards out today.

Hope this helps took me a while to figrue it out.