SimCity 3000 Unlimited Performance Problems

Having problems?

Several of our users have reported performance problems in SimCity 3000 Unlimited compared to SimCity 3000. We have done thorough testing and confirmed the following situation: On some, but not all systems, a perceivable slowdown occurs in the first few minutes of game play. This slowdown completely disappears after several minutes of game play, and mostly affects the load time of the first city loaded. The slowdown relates to a background check for game updates, which can easily be disabled or delayed to fix this problem.

Note: Aside from this one problem, we have not been able to detect any other performance issues compared to SimCity 3000. Load times and simulation times are entirely identical between the two products if the background update check is not occurring. If you are experiencing slowness or other problems after trying our solution, please contact EA technical support.

Solution

If you are not interested in being automatically notified of game updates in the future, you can easily disable background update checking in the following way:

1. Download this file UpdateSettings.ini.
2. Save this file to "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 3000 Unlimited\Apps\Updater", overwriting the existing UpdateSettings.ini file. Note: If you have installed the game to a directory other than "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 3000 Unlimited", use that directory instead.
3. The next time you run SimCity 3000 Unlimited, background update checking will no longer occur. You may still notice a background task called "SimCity Updater," but the task will be completely idle and therefore will not affect game performance.
4. Note that you can still manually check for game updates by launching the "Get SimCity Updates" utility.

If you are interested in being automatically notified of game updates in the future, you can significantly reduce performance issues in the following way:

1. Download this file UpdateSettings.ini.
2. Save this file to "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 3000 Unlimited\Apps\Updater", overwriting the existing UpdateSettings.ini file. Note: If you have installed the game to a directory other than "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 3000 Unlimited", use that directory instead.
3. The next time you run SimCity 3000 Unlimited, background update checking will still occur, but will not affect initial load times.