How to play this game on highend PC

[The Mandarin Skyrush]

Currently this game is almost unplayable on my highend PC. I hava intep i7 7700k, 16GB Ram, GTX1080ti. I am getting very low frames and screen tear is so bad that all buildings look like Greek pastries.

[NetPCDoc]

You might try reviewing info at:

http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Shortcut_Parameters

[[MK] Vector95]

Switch rendering mode to software in your in-game graphics options panel, the hardware such as your GPU is way too powerful for the game to handle it and the game isn't designed to run on multiple CPU cores at once or with more recent and powerful high end graphics or sound cards either, it can only run only on a single core and with software mode enabled, your setup should mre than surffice in terms of software output.

-w (windowed mode)

-Intro:Off/On (enable or disable in-game intro, which make the game start much quicker)

-CustomResolutio:enabled/disabled (set this to enabled when you want a custom resolution setting, do not touch the resolution presets on the graphics panel in the game, it will disable or overide your custom resolution setting)

-rXXXXxXXXXxXX (e.g -r1920x1080x32, not sure if this game can be displayed on higher resolution settings than this, i recommend that you keep it on 32-bit.)

-CPUCount: 1,2,3,4 etc (Restricts the games number of CPU core used to just one or how you like to have the game run on, which if set to just a single core greatly improves the games performance, you might as well leave it with just 1 core (which is CPU 0 in Task Manager > Details > Set Affinity.)

-CPUPrioirty:High (Your PC will prioritise this task over lower priority apps or background tasks, which will prevent many fatal crashes and bugs relating to this game)

In a single command line in your Steam Games Library > SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition > Properties > Set Launch Options, on steam without the quotation marks

"-w -Intro:Off -CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32 -CPUCount:1"

[MGB]

Originally posted by MK Vector1995:

Switch rendering mode to software in your in-game graphics options panel, the hardware such as your GPU is way too powerful for the game to handle it and the game isn't designed to run on multiple CPU cores at once or with more recent and powerful high end graphics or sound cards either, it can only run only on a single core and with software mode enabled, your setup should mre than surffice in terms of software output.

NOOO! That's literally the last thing you want to do to improve performance.

DirectX Rendering = Using the GPU and it's VRAM to render the game
Software Rendering = Using the CPU to do this instead

SC4 is a CPU intensive game, if you give it the job of the Videocard, performance is worse. The real problem here is an incompatibility between your modern GPU/drivers and SC4, But, most of the time this can be solved by manually setting up your GPU for use with SC4, see here for how:

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/33931-how-to-configure-sc4-to-work-with-your-new-hardware/
or
https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/65165-guide-running-simcity-4-on-windows-8/

Only if this can not be made to work, should you consider switching to software rendering. It is, afterall a last-resort option. In fact, before I did that, I'd use the On-Board Intel GPU to render the game, it works with DirectX and would be better than software rendering.