Slideshow

SimCity Societies at maximum settings is also one of the worst slideshows I have seen. When maxed out with all the settings at High or Ultra, high end systems will produce a frame rate of four to six frames per second at 1600x1200 - that's with something like an AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 and an ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT - making the game completely unplayable. It doesn't even look that impressive at these settings, just slow. Predefined "High" setting is actually far less than the maximum setting, fiddling some settings to medium, some high, and this "High" setting turns the game playable on today's high end systems, at least initially.

Everything manually set to Maximum or Ultra - 5fps on a top end system.	"High" setting - Fine on the YouGamers recommended setup.
"Medium" setting, playable on the YouGamers minimum system (at least until the city grows large)	"Low" setting - often the only way to get playable framerates with large cities.

It's just that the performance keeps getting worse as your city grows, and a system that can happily push things around at predefined "High" setting at the start may have to drop down to "Low" when the city is all grown - every building and Sim added keeps on slowing down the game. The minimum requirements on the box are utter fiction; sure, you can start building a city, but everything will be a stuttering slideshow long before you can finish one - assuming you don't fall asleep before that.

The performance is completely CPU limited at higher settings. Shadows and lighting also affect things a lot and the frame rate can fluctuate wildly depending on the time of the day - on our test system at bit over predefined "High" settings the fps fluctuated between 20 and 60 depending on the time and the amount of activity on screen (at 1600x1200). A slower CPU showed linear scaling, and at the minimum recommended level, even with a top end video card, the frame rate was stuck to 30-35fps at daytime and half of that at nighttime. You still need a somewhat modern midrange card (or you have to at least ditch the shadows), but CPU is the most important bit.

Shadows enabled.

Shadows disabled.

On top of all the performance issues, the game keeps crashing on NVIDIA cards repeatedly - I initially tried to play the game on a GeForce 8800 GTX, but no matter what I tried, the thing kept crashing and locking up the whole PC every 10-20 minutes, until I just swapped the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT back in. I'm sure the problem will be patched sooner or later, but it speakes volumes about the QA process this game has gone through (ie. "Oops, Christmas is coming up, let's press the discs and patch later!").