SimCity 4 on Mac: How to Play & M1 Benchmarks

6 Comments

1. 

   Javier Gallardo Vía on May 27, 2015 at 11:08 am

   I believe to have exactly the same kind of iMac as you (27″i7-512mbVRAM-late 2009) and I agree about performance.
   I like “Cities Skylines” a lot (being a similar game) but performance is quite poor for millions (?) of systems that are 3+ years old…
   There is a nice market for really good games made years ago that can run at full specs on our respectable Mac… It should be a bonus for the OSX systems to get a lot of nice games that PC users have had for a long time….

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     Mac Gamer Ric on July 27, 2015 at 9:05 am

     Our Skylines review is coming soon but that game is definitely solid.
     Regarding RAM, you should know that RAM doesn’t make a huge difference when it comes to games, unless your RAM is so low it becomes the bottleneck. That said it never hurts to have more and while pairing is optimum, you’re not obliged.. I would update first 2 slots with 8 GB each and update the remaining 2 once I get the money. Cheers!

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2. 

   mikelyons on May 27, 2015 at 11:14 pm

   Nice review of this classic. Personally, I am more than happy to see classic game releases get reviews too. I think it is entirely relevant to give attention to these games.

   What would be very interesting is a review of the Aspyr port of the latest SimCity that is single player only and Mac App Store only vs. the poorly received EA Mac version only available on Origin so far as i know. I bought that on a sale (the MAS version), not that I have gotten around to it yet but knowing I am fine with single player only and expecting a quality port from Aspyr, I expect I will enjoy it. I have read up on what the game is and is not and that works for me personally. I’m okay with a more casual SimCity experience.

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     Mac Gamer Ric on July 27, 2015 at 9:08 am

     I’m not sure we will start systematically reviewing old classics but if a classic is remastered, hell yeah! In fact, there’s a review coming soon that will be a perfect example 😉

     Regarding SimCity, that’s a good comment, will Aspyr’e port run better than EA’s? I certainly hope that part of the deal was that Aspyr removes bugs for all versions but can’t know for sure. I will ask Aspyr to get a comment here.

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3. 

   Bill on August 5, 2015 at 9:42 am

   Looks like an awesome game. My only concern is will it work on a MacBook Pro (Mid-2012)? I currently have 4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 memory, intel HD graphics 4000, and a 2.5 GHz intel core i5 processor. I just didn’t know if you needed a desktop to successfully run games or if a laptop would work. Would hate to spend the money to find out the game doesn’t work.

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     Mac Gamer Ric on September 15, 2015 at 10:22 am

     Hey there. Some laptops can easily play the latest games, however they do need a particularly good graphics card. That’s why they are much more expensive than their desktop counterparts and why people just say that laptops aren’t suited for games. Anyway, on your case, you should be able to run it in low to medium settings at 720p resolution. I say this because your Mac is powerful enough but your graphics card is getting older and could be a bottleneck.

     Unfortunately, impossible to confirm without actually trying, but I’m optimistic for your config specially on an older game like this one.

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