Getting the Sims 3 to Run on a New Laptop?
Hi all, A little over a year ago, I bought a new gaming laptop. I was really eager to get the Sims games up and running on it, but I've run into an issue while trying to get TS3 to work. Of course,...
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Limiting fps: For cards that are powerful enough to throw high and wildly fluctuating frame rates that are greater than one's monitor/screen can interpret, this is not optional. TS3 being an older game has no functional built-in fps limiter (even TS4 has one). Uncapped and too high fps rates can lead to graphics glitches, screen tears, poor performance, lag, crashes, and can over time ultimately burn out the graphics card.
To test your actual fps rates in-game, ctrl+shift+C to bring up the cheats console and type fps on (enter). As you play and move the game camera around, the displayed fps rate should never rise above the refresh rate of your monitor. Most are 60 Hz, so that's 60 fps, but some can run a bit higher. To make the display go away, cheats console again and type fps off (enter). The tools to use to address this depend on the brand/kind of card being used. For Nvidia cards, that would be the Nvidia Control Panel and when necessary Nvidia Inspector. Can go into greater detail as needed if you tell us what you have for a graphics card.
Formal graphics card recognition: This is unrelated to the above, less important, and the one that requires sgr file editing. A not formally recognized graphics card does not hurt the hardware and the card still gets used as it should as long as it is detected. What formal recognition does is assign the card a proper default profile. Yes, it is fine to change the Graphics Options settings away from the defaults regardless, although setting them higher than your card can really handle if relevant will not lead to terrific gameplay. An unrecognized card can also lead the game to under-rank it and thus needlessly throttle certain in-game things like sending sims to populate community lots in an attempt to preserve performance. This, besides playing in worlds where there are far too many things to do vying for a small population's attention, is one of the huge reasons players over the years have complained about Empty Lot syndrome where when our sims go out into the world or the player pokes around town with the game camera, it feels like no one else is at any of the venues.
I can help you with the card recognition thing if you send me the first 40 lines or so of the contents of the file called DeviceConfig.log (will show up as just DeviceConfig if you have file extension names hidden) copied and pasted into a PM. Not the long lists of game options, the parts that come above those. We do it this way so as not to confuse players who have all different graphics cards. But it's much more important to check on the fps rates and address those first.
To test your actual fps rates in-game, ctrl+shift+C to bring up the cheats console and type fps on (enter). As you play and move the game camera around, the displayed fps rate should never rise above the refresh rate of your monitor. Most are 60 Hz, so that's 60 fps, but some can run a bit higher. To make the display go away, cheats console again and type fps off (enter). The tools to use to address this depend on the brand/kind of card being used. For Nvidia cards, that would be the Nvidia Control Panel and when necessary Nvidia Inspector. Can go into greater detail as needed if you tell us what you have for a graphics card.
Formal graphics card recognition: This is unrelated to the above, less important, and the one that requires sgr file editing. A not formally recognized graphics card does not hurt the hardware and the card still gets used as it should as long as it is detected. What formal recognition does is assign the card a proper default profile. Yes, it is fine to change the Graphics Options settings away from the defaults regardless, although setting them higher than your card can really handle if relevant will not lead to terrific gameplay. An unrecognized card can also lead the game to under-rank it and thus needlessly throttle certain in-game things like sending sims to populate community lots in an attempt to preserve performance. This, besides playing in worlds where there are far too many things to do vying for a small population's attention, is one of the huge reasons players over the years have complained about Empty Lot syndrome where when our sims go out into the world or the player pokes around town with the game camera, it feels like no one else is at any of the venues.
I can help you with the card recognition thing if you send me the first 40 lines or so of the contents of the file called DeviceConfig.log (will show up as just DeviceConfig if you have file extension names hidden) copied and pasted into a PM. Not the long lists of game options, the parts that come above those. We do it this way so as not to confuse players who have all different graphics cards. But it's much more important to check on the fps rates and address those first.
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