SimCity 4 choppy scrolling with ATI

I noticed SimCity 4 is running slowly on my laptop. Scrolling is quite choppy, especially on the large cities. Turning down the settings does improve performance but I shouldn't need to turn down anything as it's a relatively old game - I managed to play it with similar performance on my old laptop with integrated graphics! Running in software mode actually increases performance! So I guess it must be driver issue with ATI.

 

You're not alone actually. It happens to all computers, low or high end which I've tested many times. And when the city gets bigger and bigger, the problem persists. It's the way the game has been programmed, it's just horrible. SC4 is a CPU intensive game, and very little has to do with graphics. Not surprisingly it only utilizes one core. Yes, miserable I know.

I've a desktop with i7 950 @ 4.3GHz, 12GB RAM (for photoshop and workstation purposes) and GTX 295 Quad SLI (second card was given free ), it ran the same performance with my lower end Dell Inspiron 1720 (see sig)

Don't run with hardware accelerated graphics with this game. Use software render. Sadly, SC4 doesn't make use of the hardware wholefully and properly. And Maxis is just lazy to fix that.

 

Setting the affinity to just one core once you are in the game helped some of my choppiness (and the crashing)

 

ouch that is such a overkill system lol .. by any chance do u have 3 SSD's in RAID 0 in there?