@PepsyQ The game is still using more CPU than I'd expect, and the workload of the Nvidia card is low, but it sounds like the game is at least playable. I think you should be able to raise the graphics settings as well, although it's best to leave water and high-detail lots on the low end. Your GPU clearly has plenty of headroom to accommodate a higher workload.
The game itself willl have some fps drops, although I'm surprised you're seeing framerates in the 30s. Does it improve if you play in fullscreen mode?
For the lines, you can try enabling antialiasing in the Nvidia Control Panel. These are the settings I usually suggest:
Antialiasing - FXAA: On Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On Antialiasing - Mode: Override any Application Setting Antialiasing - Setting: 2x [or higher]
But there's no harm in experimenting to figure out what works best for you.
I raised some graphics settings (except water and high-detail lots) and the fps were kind of the same. Huge lag spikes though, where the fps would drop to 0-3 and then work their way up to 62. The weird lines dissapeared and nothing improves if I play in fullscreen, it's the same as windowed. The lag spikes really annoy me, they occur even when I change the Sims speed from normal to higher. Is there any way to fix them? (attached another task manager photo. I had wifi on this time.)
@PepsyQ From your screenshots, it seems highly that the lag spikes happen when CPU use reaches 100% in-game. This can be addressed in part by not running any other tasks that use significant CPU; you can see which ones those are at any given moment in the Task Manager as well. But Sims 3 shouldn't be using nearly this much either, and the question is why.
So, my questions:
Are you still playing in Sunset Valley, and if not, where?
Which expansions do you currently have installed?
Have you installed any store content?
Have you added back in any third-party content?
How many sims are in your active household, and how many pets?
Have you edited the world at all since the save was started?
There are plenty of causes of lag, too many to list really, so it's necessary to narrow things down a bit. If you happen to use NRaas mods in general, now would be a good time to add them, except leave out StoryProgression (or remove it) for now—it's the one NRaas mod that adds significant overhead to the game.
I will add the NRaas mods and will let you know how it went 🙂
edit: Game still had lag spikes, worse ones while on 3x speed. The weird lines would sometimes reappear (I changed the Nvidia settings). While on normal speed, everything moves much better than before, but still not perfect. I will attach another task manager picture (the game was in 3x speed)
@PepsyQ I'm still baffled as to why Sims 3 would use so much of your processor. I mean, it shouldn't be able to at all considering it can only use two CPU cores or threads, and yours has four cores. But regardless of how much of this is a Task Manager reporting error, the overall load is still excessive, and it still seems likely to me that the lag you're seeing is due to the overall processor load.
Have you installed NRaas Overwatch, and if so, how many vehicles does it clean up each night? Have you installed MasterController, and if so, what are the town's demographics? In particular, I'm wondering whether your save has thousands of unnecessary NPC sims. MasterController can usually find them if you're persistent. If the Demographics options don't turn anything up, try running a simple command from City Hall, for example NRaas > MC > Sim > Basic > Family Tree, then filter by Type of Service, Type of Role, or Type of Sim (Or) > Service. Run a few different commands—the results aren't always exactly the same—and let me know if the number of sims in any list is higher than a few dozen.
You don't need to do alll of them, but for now at least, it's a good idea to implement everything feasible and see how well the game runs under ideal conditions. The one thing you definitely don't need to do is lower the graphcis settings: as said, your hardware should handle mostly ultra settings just fine, and if it's not doing so, that means something else isn't working properly.
I got some other mods from NRaas (traffic and something with the ''go here'' command), but no change. I believe that the lag spikes are more often and last a bit longer. Somewhere around 17 cars/hour are cleaned and I attached some pictures with the found sims (sorry for the bad quality, the prntsc button wouldn't work). I did up the settings a bit too.
@PepsyQ I'm sorry for the late reply. Your numbers looked odd to me in a few different ways, so I wanted to test myself, but that took more time than I intended for a couple different reasons.
Anyway, for comparison's sake, I started a new save in Sunset Valley and let the game clock run for just over a sim-day, then compared my list of sims to yours:
Then I let it run until the summer holiday:
As you can see, my save has nowhere near the number of sims yours does, but there isn't just one type of sim that's overrepresented in your game. The single biggest impact is likely the fact that your save has more than double the residents mine does: resident sims will demand much more in the way of resources than NPCs or tourists. But there are too many Local MiniSims, a category that can include both tourists (even if they're not listed as tourists in the filter) and homeless NPCs associated with the current world.
The current-world NPCs I generally don't worry about until their numbers get into the hundreds, but too many would-be tourists might be a problem if they're not actually instantiating as tourists and the game engine can't figure out what to do with them. So the next step depends on what these sims are. Run the Basic > Family Tree command again, choose Type of Sim (and) > Local MiniSim, and take a look at the list. Let me know approximately how many stray animals, sims with "foreign" names (that sound like they're from one of the World Adventures worlds), and "regular" sims you see. I'm not asking you to count them all out; just give me an idea of the composition of the list. For example, mine has three stray dogs, half a dozen foreign names, and the rest are random sims.
The point here is to figure out where these sims are coming from and not only get rid of them, or at least limit their numbers, but prevent them from overspawning again.
On the subject of residents, did you do anything to add all these sims to your save? Did you plop down a bunch of extra houses? NRaas StoryProgression can do rapid immigration, but the game itself usually does not. If you didn't do anything special, please check in Edit Town to see how many households showed up on their own, and how many existing households have grown in size, whether through adding sims or pets.
Yes, I did actually. I had the StoryProgression mod by NRaas, but I didn't know how big the impact was. I removed that mod a while ago. I will run that command again and will let you know what the results were.
edit found somewhere around 83 locals and 40 tourists (I think) and only 1 animal- horse. The thing was that it was very fluid, the lag spikes weren't happening that often. I got my cc back (uninstalled many of it), installed a patch (lazy duchess) and now it is play-able. I really want to thank you for helping me this far. If it wasn't for you, I would've stopped playing Sims 3. Thank you very much!
@PepsyQ I'm glad to hear that, and yes, StoryProgression is definitely a resource hog. That's why I mentioned not adding it back right away. But you can probably use it if you let it run on one of the slowest speeds (slow or snail), perhaps in addition to lengthening the cycle of the skill manager, which is the most demanding among them. The overall speed is under SP > General Options > Adjust Speed; each manager's speed can be adjusted further as well, for example SP > General Options > Options:Skills > Speed. The speed is listed in sim-minutes, and a longer interval means a lower impact overall.
Having more residents means more sims to push around, meaning more work for SP and a higher impact on performance. Homeless sims can also advance a little here and there, especially if they're chosen as coworkers for your active sims, but they have less impact per sim since they spend so much time off the map. Their cumulative impact can still be high though. And adding more SP modules will also raise the demands the mod places on the game, so it's best to only add those whose features you need or really want.
You may still see lag when an SP manager is running, but that will happen less often at slower speeds, of course, and the overall impact will be smaller with fewer sims to impact. You can also disable certain functions, for example I don't allow my sims to move on their own and have home inspections disabled, so SP doesn't concern itself with figuring out whether each and every household should be living somewhere else.
Point is, with some tweaking, you can set up SP to work well for you. And you can import your settings to new saves as well—exporting and importing mod settings are of Overwatch—so you'd really only need to go through the initial setup process once.
Or you could skip SP entirely. It's certainly not necessary to enjoy the game, even if it does make things more interesting for a lot of us.
Yeah, won't be adding SP again, runs much better without it. Lag spikes aren't that often anymore and don't last too long. Screen tearing still happens (found out how it's called, also found out that my display is connected to the Intel UHD graphics card). Updated the graphic card driver multiple times, but screen tearing is still there. Do you have any idea how to fix this problem? Sorry for bothering again 🙂
@PepsyQ The usual fix for screen tearing is to enable vertical sync. However, most gaming laptops run graphics output through the integrated chip, and one of the unfortunate side effects is that enabling vertical sync in the Nvidia Control Panel doesn't work properly. So you'll need to use an outside tool. This is the only one I know of that works with Sims 3:
It's based on RivaTuner Statistics Server, a popular and lightweight app for capping fps, but you don't need to install RTSS for this to work.
In case you're not aware, vertical sync only works in fullscreen mode. If you'd prefer to play in windowed mode, you can try setting your fps limit to 60 or 59 in the Control Panel, but that doesn't always help either.
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