Overview
Are none of the solutions to fix SC4 lag working?Still frustrated by the 22 fps cap?This SimCity 4 lag fix is for you!!!
1. Try this if you didn’t already try it
Here are Simtropolis’s and Steam’s solutions.
These solutions worked for most people, but they didn’t work for me.
If you’ve tried these already, skip it.
Comunity Solution 1:
-CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32 -f -d:DirectX -Cursors:fullcolor -Intro:off -CPUPriority:high -CPUCount:1
Put that into the launch options and it’ll optimize it for most modern pc’s.
Community Solution 2:
Change to software rendering
or
Turn off shadows
Community Solution 3:
[link]
“- Open the “Graphics Rules.sgr” (make a backup first) in your SimCity 4 directory
– Find the line “property TextureBits 32” in the “rule ‘Standard Hardware'” block (use ctrl+F)
– After that line add “property usevertexbuffers false” without quotes and be sure to leave the “end” tag intact.”
Community Solution 4:
[link]
This is if you got a fancy graphics card, and the game doesn’t recognize it. Worked for some people, but it didn’t work for me. Instead it took me a long ass time to do it, with no results.
If you did all the google searching in the world and you still couldn’t find the solution to fixing lag in SimCity 4, then you’re just like me. And I have a solution for you.
2. My Lag Fix Solution for SimCity 4
Basically, I found a way to completely remove the 20fps frame cap from SimCity 4.
Put this in to your launch options! Even if you already did!! :
-CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32 -w -d:DirectX -Cursors:fullcolor -Intro:off -CPUPriority:high -CPUCount:1
This will make SimCity 4 run in windowed mode.
The “-w” does that.
For some weird reason, SimCity 4 puts a 20fps frame cap when in fullscreen.
But once you put it in windowed mode, The framecap gets removed entirely, causing it to shoot up to 2,000-4,000fps. It does that for me, at least.
The only problem with this is that the frames fluctate like crazy, and scrolling through a city doesn’t happen smoothly at all. Normally, a frame cap at 200fps would fix this (this is the frame cap for most games of today) but windowed mode removes the frame cap completely. I can only remove the frame cap, but I can’t change it to 200fps so that it can stop fluctuating like crazy.
Now is the time to get a small fullscreenizer software. It will make your windowed mode into borderless fullscreen.
Basically, you’re still in windowed mode, but it’ll remove the taskbar and top bar thing so that it looks like it’s fullscreen.
[link]
This is the borderless fullscreen software I use. Make sure to run it as administrator, and run it while SimCity 4 is running. The rest should be easy to figure out.
3. Summary
So, here’s the thing:
- The community’s solutions don’t work for a lot of people.
- I found a solution that worked for me, that will likely work for you.
- You have to make SimCity 4 run in windowed mode, this fixes lag by removing the fps cap.
- In order to make it playable now, you can use a fullscreenizer software to make the windowed mode into fullscreen.
yeah so here you go