I have been up for way too long so yeah, I'm feeling rather incompetent. I need help with Sim City 4 and running it on my Windows 7 laptop my specifications are: 2.3Ghz dual core processor and 6.00 GB of RAM. More details can be found here:http://in.asus.com/Notebooks/Versatile_Performance/X53E/

I have tried compatibility mode and some of the other tricks, I was hoping someone would know of something that would actually get the game playing with a decent frame rate and graphical quality. I prefer GOG over Steam so I'm asking here.

I'm not sure what my problem is exactly and I was hoping with provided specs someone might be able to help me out, I could just go back to playing Tropico.

Common sense would tell you that a modern rig should be able to blow a game from 2003 away. But unfortunately, SimCity 4 relied on using some fancy rendering tricks to get it to run efficiently (at least, at the time).

Newer graphics cards won't allow those tricks to work anymore, and consequently causes the game to run like crap despite having way more graphical horsepower than the game would ever need.

I'm afraid that unless your card is listed as compatible on the game's Steam page, you're bum-outta-luck.

My machine has a GTX260, which isn't listed on Steam's page, yet I can run the game. Here are some tweaks you might need to do:

1) Turn shadows to low quality.
2) Add -CPUCount:1 to your shortcut to force single-core processing.
3) Try using software rendering instead of hardware rendering.
4) Adding -EH:off to your shortcut (EH = Exception Handling) may prevent crashes to the desktop if you have this issue.

Give these a try and see it runs.

Oh, also, higher resolutions are possible. Here is some more info:

SimCity 4 does have native widescreen support. All you need to do is add this to the target of your SimCity4 shortcut:

-CustomResolution:enabled -r1280x720x32

Just change 1280x720x32 to the resolution you're looking for. For example:

"C:\Games\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\simcity 4.exe" -CustomResolution:enabled -r1680x1050x32

Supported resolutions are:

1280 x 800 (16:10)
1440 x 900 (16:10)
1680 x 1050 (16:10)
1920 x 1200 (16:10)
1024 x 576 (16:9)
1360 x 768 (16:9)
1024 x 600 (16:9)
1600 x 900 (16:9)
1920 x 1080 (16:9)
2048 x 1152 (16:9)
1366x768 (16:9)

Note that while some resolutions are supported, some clipping of the interface may occur making it impossible to control
certain functions, such as "raise mountains" in 1024x600.


BUG NOTE:
The game appears to have a cosmetic bug at high resolutions (>= 1600x1200, reportedly): The images (thumbnails) of large
cities in the region have a minor corruption. EA tech support has claimed that this is due to NVIDIA driver limitations.

Re-saving a city in a lower resolution may fix the graphics, however it may re-occur after saving in high-res.
You can skip the thumbnail generation by saving using Alt-Ctrl-S, however of course that will mean the thumbnail will not
reflect changes made to the city since the last "full" save.

Sorry, I can't help you but I will say Sim City 4 Deluxe runs great on my GTX570 on Win7 64-bit with no tweaks at all so it is possible to do. I know that doesn't help you here and for that I'm sorry.

Sim4 is virtually all bug. I don't mean to be Mr. Negative but even when it's running smooth it's not that smooth. It makes me think that it was a rush job. I gave it a shot for a few weeks and realized for me SIm2k was still the better game even if the graphics aren't nearly as good.

And here I went and bought it on the sale. Darn it!

Same here, I think maybe I'll have better luck if I try some different fixes. Get Tropico Reloaded on GOG.com, I recommend it, also Pharaoh, Caesar 3, and Acropolis should be great for you if you're into city building.