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snmiller16's avatar
snmiller16
7 years ago

How to make TS3 game run off the NVIDIA card....

Back story just so you know before I get to my question: My Sims 3 was going good on my husband's laptop here, going pretty smooth. Actually more smooth than I'd ever seen on my not even 4 year old laptop (that is now toast), or my ancient desktop in it's prime (which has been toast for about 4 years now). My Sims moved so gracefully and quickly on this laptop, it was beautiful. Anywho, I also only at first experienced maybe 1 crash at a time over a period of say 7 hours. Then turned into about 3 or 4. But still going pretty good. And this is all while having mods and CC. This week though, loading the game takes about 10+ minutes, then loading my saved game takes about 20-25, and saving my game takes about the same amount of time. My Sims move painfully slow. I turned the graphics down, I even put the screen size down. Deleted cache. Husband has a weekly defrag on the laptop. He's even done a whole system reset, but not before backing up my Sims folder on a flash drive. So once the reboot was done I reinstalled everything, copied my Sims folder onto the blank Sims folder. But it's still going painfully slow. So I'm thinking (after reading up), that maybe it's possible TS3 has stopped using hubby's NVIDIA card and is using the Intel one? If I'm right, how do I access the NVIDIA settings and how do I make Sims use the NVIDIA?
  • igazor's avatar
    igazor
    7 years ago
    You do have dual graphics on that system, but the drivers for both the Intel and the Nvidia card haven't been updated in years while Win 10 has been. I would strongly suggest going through the manufacturer's site, that would be Asus, to obtain updated drivers for that model. There almost have to be updated versions available for both.

    Once that's squared away, the typical method to get TS3 to use the Nvidia card would be to use the Nvidia Control Panel to set up a profile for the game (that's TS3.exe for Patch 1.69, TS3w.exe with the "w" for 1.67), select "Use High Performance Card" (or something like that) where given a choice since you do have dual, and while there make sure vertical sync is set to "On" or "Adaptive" and Triple Buffering to "On" for the game's profile. To see which card is in use, there should be a pull-down menu option on the Control Panel that says something like Show or Monitor card usage. I'm not on Nvidia so I can't provide a screen shot, but this one does a great job of showing the setup:
    http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/comment/15007970#Comment_15007970
  • igazor's avatar
    igazor
    7 years ago
    Does a newly started test game perform any better or is it only the ongoing save that is behaving this way?

    On the graphics card question, we should confirm that you have dual graphics and see which drivers it's using before we get into how to see which card it's using or if something else needs to be adjusted. Not all systems have dual. If you could please run a full dxdiag report on this laptop, send it up to Pastebin.com and provide a link so we can read it, we can suggest the best way to proceed from there.

    How to run one: https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information
  • snmiller16's avatar
    snmiller16
    7 years ago
    I didn't try to run a clean slate of a game...

    I did do the dxdiag report just now, and I went to do the Pastebin, but I have no clue how to do it. Do I have to sign up or...how does that work?
  • igazor's avatar
    igazor
    7 years ago
    "snslye;c-16623252" wrote:
    I didn't try to run a clean slate of a game...

    I did do the dxdiag report just now, and I went to do the Pastebin, but I have no clue how to do it. Do I have to sign up or...how does that work?

    It doesn't have to be pastebin.com, that's just the easiest one to use. No account creation or signing up necessary, the free version is fine. There should be a New Paste button into which you can copy and then paste your full report. Then Create should provide a sharable link to it. But you can use any other file sharing service if you prefer, or you could paste the results in here but you would have to use many replies by section because the full report would be far too long to fit into one.
  • snmiller16's avatar
    snmiller16
    7 years ago
    Oh I see. My husband has only had this laptop since probably February or March, he's probably not aware that the drivers haven't been updated. Plus he did do a factory reset a few days ago to see if it would fix the problem (which of course didn't and eventually lead to me making this thread after some searching). See, I knew it had to have been something to do w/ the Nvidia. lol. Thank you for the help, I'll look into getting the updates.
  • igazor's avatar
    igazor
    7 years ago
    Paging @SimplyJen just in case further assistance is needed verifying which card is in use. I'm on AMD and the tools we have to work with are different. And from there, we should move on to checking the fps rate in-game to make sure it's staying below 60 fps as per vertical sync. If it is not, or if windowed mode is required as vertical sync only works in full-screen, then we move on to Nvidia Inspector to make that work properly.

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