System Requirements

Here you will find the System Requirements for SimCity 4.

You can also test your computer to see if you are able to run the game or if you need to upgrade.

Can you RUN it? – Test your Computer to find out

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

OS: Windows Vista/XP/ME/2000/98 (Windows 95/NT not supported)
Processor: 1 GHz or faster
Memory: 256 MB or more
HDD: 1 gig plus space for saved games
Video Card: 32 MB or greater supported Direct 3D video card
CD/DVD-Rom Speed: 8X
Sound Card: DirectX 7.0 compatible
DirectX version: DirectX 7.0
Input: Mouse,Keyboard

** Supported chipsets :
NVIDIA Geforce4, Geforce3, Geforce 2, Geforce 256
NVIDIA TNT2, TNT
ATI Radeon 9700, 9000, 8500, 7500, 7200, 7000
Matrox Parhelia
Matrox G550, G450, G400

PERFORMANCE TIPS:

Disappearing Buildings When Scrolling

  • Many cards (including the ATI Radeons) lack support for a backing store, which SimCity 4 utilizes. For those cards, SimCity 4 is forced to disable the rendering of many of the view objects (like buildings) during scroll. This is intentional to ensure responsiveness while scrolling. You can enable the rendering of all objects by editing your “Graphics Rules.sgr” which is found in the Sim City 4 directory installed to your hard drive. With any text editor go into this file and change the following property from true to false:property noPartialBackingStoreCopies falseNote, however, that doing so can adversely effect scrolling speeds.

Performance Problems

  • If this problem is occurring for brief periods, this is to be expected. If these pauses occur for longer than several seconds, the likely reason is that you have run out of RAM. The larger the city, the more RAM the game requires. In this case, you have several options short of purchasing more RAM. First, play on smaller cities (64×64 tile cities). Secondly, play with City Detail turned to medium or low. City Detail can be found in the Graphics options and reduces the number of objects rendered in the world (such as trees, street lights, stop signs, etc). After changing this setting, you must exit your city and re-enter it to take effect. Third, have few or no other applications running simultaneously with the game. A combination of these three options should improve performance.

Anti-Aliasing problems

  • We’ve tested the game with full-screen anti-aliasing on a variety of cards. We found that beyond some graphics glitches (streaking) the game runs fine. If, however, if you have overclocked your card or have beta drivers, a crash might result.