18 ms·
I've long been a SimCity fan, but every edition of the game has suffered from performance problems. It's fine when your city is small, but once it gets large en
by apike 14y ago
I've long been a SimCity fan, but every edition of the game has suffered from performance problems. It's fine when your city is small, but once it gets large enough to be interesting, it's unbearably slow. I've learned that the real minimum requirements on these games are a computer released 2-3 years after the game is.
Given the amount of marketing around the new game's excessive simulation of unimportant details, I expect it to be at least as bad as its predecessors.
- mortenjorck 14y agoI read somewhere that the tilt-shift effect is actually a performance booster as well as stylistic choice – it creates an LOD cutoff that enables lower-poly models to be rendered in the background to offset extra-high detail in the foreground.
- apike 14y agoIf true, that is a really awesome hack. I've always assumed the performance problems were more about O(n^2) simulations, such as every Sim evaluating every route for driving to work, etc. If it's mostly graphics bound this could be a big help.
- icefox 14y agoThe whole application sounds like an optimizer's dream. Improving performance (especially startup) has always one of the most fun aspects of programing for me and to take one something like sim city where there are probably tons of opportunities and many different things to consider would be a real fun job.
- Macha 14y agoAlso Simcity 4 at least performs appallingly on modern hardware. You need to disable hardware rendering as it's actually slower on modern graphics cards and you need to limit it to one cpu or it gets very unstable. To the point where the best system to play it is probably a high clock speed P4 plus an Geforce 8800 or something.