I upgraded my mom's PC so my younger brother could play his games on it without frequent lagging and freezing, and he decided he wanted to install Sim City 4. So we get it installed and start playing the game and without any warning the SCREEN goes black. The Sims toolbar on the bottom of the screen is still there, and the cursor is there, just the actual town and surrounding region is black. I can hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, and then hit cancel, and when it goes back to the game everything is back to normal. After a a little more playing TIME the same thing happens. This happened before I changed some graphics settings in the game.

I changed the color from 16bit to 32bit, and that by itself didn't help, so I also changed the Renderer from Hardware to Software. After doing so, everything has worked fine so far without any issues. What exactly does it mean to switch from hardware to software rendering? I know the game is fairly old, but I WOULD think it would run just fine with the new GPU I installed. I guess I was wrong.

Specs:
Windows Vista 32bit
GeForce GT 220 1GB (DirectX 10)
Intel E5400 Dual Core @ 2.7GHz
PNY 2GB DDR2 800MHz
Foxconn G33M02 MoBoUndo Your Changes - So That Everything Will Be Normal Quote from: the_mad_joker on February 08, 2010, 03:14:04 AM

Undo Your Changes - So That Everything Will Be Normal