I by no means have a great pc, it's a i3, 6gb of ram and a gt320, but i can run most games on atleast medium settings with some things turned up.

But this game? Jeez i know it's simulating alot of stuff in the background but cmon i can't even run it on Low settings without turning the lighting down to nothing, the game looks like shit without the lighting setting.

Is anybody else suprised by this? Man i just wasted 60 bucks on this game, want a refund so badly.

Disappointing to see the game so poorly when the cities are so small and so little actual simulations occur. I would have been just as upset as you are if i purchased it.

Yup, trying to get a refund, see what happens. Man i am kinda pissed off, the city size is so small, i completed a whole city in 2 hours of work,

What makes this game run so badly?

As far as I can tell it is very processor intensive rather than graphics intensive. Either way, both of your parts aren't very good. I don't know which i3 you have, but a gt320 is an entry-level card that's not really meant for serious games. Not to defend Sim City, I don't think it's very good, but I'm not sure you can blame this particular problem on the game.

@cameron said:

Even Jeff had framerate issues. And he is using an i5 processor and a 670 gfx. The game is poorly optimized and should run well even on OP's setup if Maxis did a better job.

I have no performance issues at all, running most settings on high....

Running it on a 2012 MacBook Pro, 2.5ghz i5, 8gb RAM, Intel HD 4000.

I have a similar setup to Jeff and I haven't experienced anything major, not saying he didn't, just that it's not a complete disaster where you can't get a decent framerate even with a good system. The OP's system barely meets the minimum specifications and the minimum specifications are usually the lowest you can have without the game refusing to start. I just really don't know what you expect when your system doesn't even come close to the recommended requirements.

@cameron:

I dont know, when i can run games like battlefield 3, mass effect 3, dead space, Batman arkham city, and many other on medium or high settings then i don´t know y i can barely run Sim City on low and it looks like shit, honestly, turn down lighting to medium and just look at the game, I don´t mind that i have to turn it to low, but does it have to look like a game from 2001? Compare that to battlefield 3 on low and it looks better then the xbox version.

It doesnt look like a game from 2001 the consolegames you mentioned however have dated graphics. With Jeffs setup you clearly shouldnt have any performance issues its probably a user error like always with GB crew and hardware. And like Cameron said you cant expect anything but low settings if you have min specs

I'm running it pretty well on a tiny laptop, I've got i5 though, and it's only a few months old. The game is almost entirely processor from what I hear/see. what else do you have open eating up processor power?

Yeah it's all about that i3, go grab an i5 and that'll run it but tbh once you hit 500,000 population on the i5 it'll slow it down a bit. You can get a better video card for pretty cheap which would probably help for the lighting problem and running on low graphics.

Actually just sold my old pc,

Gonna be getting a intel i5 3470 3.6 ghz with a Radeon HD7870XT for 700 euro;s without a ssd drive

or a AMD Phenom 2 x4 3.4 ghz with a radeon HD7770 for 500 euros with a ssd drive

Anybody know if the lower spec pc is still good enough

It will run Simcity fine.

it really is all about the cpu, at home on my i3 it's only just playable--but then I haven' even cracked 100k people yet. Here at work it's so smooth on the i7 even though the gpu is garbage.

Now to figure out how I can get more play time at work...

I have an alright PC that I had gotten not too long ago and I have to say sim city is laggy. I run it with all high settings tbh BUT the lighting it probably the main reason of your lag. I run just fine with everything and the lighting at min but if I turn it to low I lag jut a bit more. And then I decide to move it up to medium and my screen is really blurry when moving and I get like 7 frames. Try turning down your lighting!! I am using an AMD FX -4130 quad core processor and not really the best graphics card with. My computer is running with 8gb of ram but I am telling you try turning down your lighting.