SYSTEM
Samsung NP530E5M-X02US laptop
- i5-7200U CPU
- NVIDIA GeForce 920MX 2GB graphics card
- 16 GB RAM after an upgrade.
- (Although it still has the stock HDD terabyte hard drive.)
GAME
Steam version
Plugins folder: 4.73 GB, 9.6k files.
City size: 135 MB
Game's been patched to use 4GB virtual memory and is running on the graphics card. As a result, game and city load times are pretty good, scrolling FPS is flawless, and rotate times are pretty good. Less than a few seconds.
However, on this one city tile, which is by far the most populous, the game hangs for almost exactly 25 seconds every time I plop or demolish anything. And it's only the game that hangs, due to its resource use limitations. I can be running Chrome and Spotify just fine in the background while the game's frozen. It ran fine for the longest time, but it seems like once I passed 700k and 4 GB plugins, it crossed some kind of magic threshold. I've been avoiding the whole game out of frustration since I'm not going to bother finishing my current region if it's going to do this every time a city passes that size.
Is this particular city just effed because it's too big for the game to handle? Or could it be that I need to get the plugins folder back below 4 GB so it's less than the game's virtual memory?
Thanks.
First of all, you should hope the game is not forced to use virtual memory very often (which is really a slow hard disk swapping bytes into RAM). Cities aren't bulked so much by population as by props, which include trees. There are lots of threads about speeding up the game (starting with turning off or minimizing shadows). Look up some of those tips to see if you find one that helps in your situation.