Why is this slow?

[The Giver]

My iBook G4 specs are 640 MB, 1 gHz, and 60 HD, so my game SimCity4 is really slow. I have downloaded the patch for it, and I have all the requirements. Why is my game slow, and if there is something to do, what can I do. My other games like Age of Empire aren't slow..

 

[Osiris22x]

It's not your computer, it's the game. I had the same problem on my 1.33 GHz Powerbook, and here's the real kicker....it was slow on my 2400 AMD PC with a gig of RAM, and a 128 MB graphics card. This PC can FLY through any game...except Sim City 4. I'm very convinced that it's a flaw within the game.

 

[witeshark]

Maybe; the last time I saw Simcity played, it was on a Mac G3 with OS 8.x and looked really good...

 

[dtx3000]

it ran fine on my dell dimension 1.5ghz with 384 ram and 32mb geforce2mx...
maybe i just have low gaming standards and didnt notice...

 

[The Giver]

Well I turned the game resolution to 800 x 600, and it was faster... but my game is faster when the city is smaller, and its slower when the city is bigger.

 

[Padawan]

Well I turned the game resolution to 800 x 600, and it was faster... but my game is faster when the city is smaller, and its slower when the city is bigger.

I in no way mean to offend you at all, but that's simply common sense. The larger and more complex the city becomes, the more system resources it requires. I know you're concerned about this, but as I said in your other thread, I think you'll have to accept the fact that the game often doesn't run smoothly on many systems (PC or Mac).

 

[Aptmunich]

so the games doesn't run well....very often the case with newish games, the specs the developers expect you to have just aren't realistic at the moment...

lets hope maxis gets it right with the next release then...

 

[iKwak]

Simcity is a ram hogger. Lagged on the pc long time ago.

 

[Mojo027]

Simcity is a ram hogger. Lagged on the pc long time ago.

He said it.

Simcity 4 is a HUGE ram hog. It's not a great game anyways .
If I had your iBook I wouldn't expect Simcity 4 to run very well.

 

[Acill]

Well I turned the game resolution to 800 x 600, and it was faster... but my game is faster when the city is smaller, and its slower when the city is bigger.

When the Powerbook 1GHZ Alum. first came out my friend had the same problem. I have a friend with a 2.8GHZ Dell laptop and its slow on that even with 1GB RAM. I would say the game is just a serious recource hog. Its a fine example of what MS and the X8 have done to computers. Coders expect raw super speeds and are now sloppy as a result.

Prior to being a Mac user I was an Amiga user ( I still am, but i have a G4 1GHZ Pegasos as my replacement "Amiga") and we could do things in graphics demos that run perfectly on a 7MHZ CPU with stero musics tracks and no slowdown at all to be seen.

 

[The Saab Pimp]

i'm not sure it's necessarily a "flaw" within the game (and i'm just speculating here) but there are so many variables going on at the same time that it would take a god-like machine to run them all smoothly. every single person, every single car, everysingle building, riots, etc, all of them are decided by a kind of virtual D&D dice with millions of sides, and the CPU has to roll the die hundreds of times a second, and it's very taxing. i imagine the only system SC4 would run smoothly on at all resolutions and city size would be the Earth Simulator in Japan.