Is an FPS higher than your refresh rate harmful?

Not limiting your FPS with this game can overwork your card , overheat the card and shorten the card's lifespan. Yes people have ruined their cards with this game. Screen tearing can be another problem. You should be capping your fps to 60 if your monitor is 60 hz.

the 750 ti is a mid level card. It's also now older . the new 1000 series is much better. You might need a better video card to handle some of the things you want your computer to do. It's not the FPS but the quality and level of your card . Some people run this game on very high end cards so they can add more taxing mods.

Even if your card is putting out 120fps or 1500fps, you're not benefiting from those extra frames. 60Hz is your monitors refresh rate / maximum amount of frames refreshed per second. It is a waste of resources for your card working overtime to pump out those extra frames that the monitor can't display. With v-sync off, your card is putting out as many frames per second as possible. With a 60Hz monitor, the most you will see is 60 FPS, therefore, there is no point in having your card struggle to put out hundreds+ frames per second.

If the GPU and other components are overstressed, temperatures will rise. This can lead to overheating. Stability and performance will be affected as a result. I can defiantly believe others have burnt out cards before. If a computer has high temperatures mixed with not so great cooling & ventilation then that's a big problem.

Reshade will drop frames... When I use Reshade, I get frame drops even with a GTX 1070 and before that, a GTX 980. Your card is just enough to handle it but expect Reshade to affect game performance. Admittedly, the latest version is much more stable frame rate wise vs the first couple of versions.

The game alone without mods or overlay tools like Reshade can have frame drops when zooming out, camera movement, or even max fast forward. I use v-sync and I get a stable 58-60 frames unless I'm playing a very large save then I can see drops down to 50 frames when zooming out, camera movement, and max fast forward.

I was going to page @SimplyJen to answer you since I don't use reshade. I see she has you covered :)

@Purrdalecki
Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames is fine at default settings... 1.
Antialiasing - FXAA improves image quality and color for 3D images. Less demanding than other Antialiasing settings. It's up to you if you want this on or not. Test to see how your computer performs with it on for The Sims 3.
Triple Buffering is good paired with v-sync.
Know that using v-sync with the NVidia Control Panel will only work in fullscreen mode so if you choose to play in windowed mode, you will need another tool to cap frames like NVidia Inspector.

It is good to keep High Detail lots on low because it's fewer surroundings the game has to render. As for the other game settings w/ your card, test to see how your computer performs. If you don't see an improvement personally then that's up to you. These are my game settings that work for me but you will need to see what works for you. I actually keep High Detail lots at 2-4 most of the time unless I'm taking certain screenshots.

Reshade works as an overlay, you're basically photoshopping the game. You will need the built-in screen capture Reshade has or an external program since the in-game camera doesn't capture overlays. Sharpening shaders work much like photoshop sharpening filters do. You can Google search some examples. It's true, HQ mod is not recommended for gameplay. It's aimed at sim modeling. With a lower texture size and the right content, it's possible to get away with using it for gameplay. I use a lower texture size paired with some HD skin. The mod allows the higher texture size to render. So without special HD content w/ high texture size... HQ mod is useless because it's not like a Reshade overlay.

I personally have tried Reshade a couple of times and still prefer to not use it. In my opinion, the 10 frames I lose using this tool is not worth it... I've created my own photoshop action and use that instead. It's simply editing my screenshots old school vs using an overlay but I follow plenty of people who do use Reshade and love it. It's up to you really what you want out of your game performance.

"Purrdalecki;c-16413882" wrote:
@SimplyJen

Thankyou for all the info! Just to confirm though, I wouldn't mess up or damage anything if I played with reshade? I personally find the default colours of the game kinda drab, so I'd want to play around with a few things on top of sharpening.

You can track temperatures and usage percent with tools like HWmonitor. Get the free version and run this in the background while playing. It's only shortening the lifespan of your hardware if the hardware is being overworked.

@Purrdalecki 50's-to 60's C would be normal . You will generate more heat while gaming. I suspect you will get even more heat if your not capping your fps which would not be good. When you open that app HWmonitor, you need to leave it open at desktop, start the game, play a while and quit. Then look at the average temps

@Purrdalecki - May I add my §.02 here and have the incredibly annoying (just kidding :p ) but helpful others on this thread convinced you to use vsync and cap those frame rates to 60 fps yet?

This should not be considered optional or conditional based on whether your card can "handle it" nor what kind of temps and percentage usage you are getting, although it is worth it to check on those for other reasons. Frame rates running higher than the refresh rate of your monitor is a bad condition, it should never be intended or allowed to happen, period.

The only way to get any kind of benefit with or without reshaders from running at 120 fps is to have a 120 Hz (or higher) refresh rate monitor. As yours is 60 Hz, like most but not all of them are, there is just no point in making or allowing the card to work that hard. At higher rates than that, sorry but besides potentially causing the game to glitch, lag, and crash all the time, you may as well make plans to buy a new computer because that card will burn itself out and potentially burn out the system board along with it.

These overly high, unsynchronized frame rates are not a feature of the game nor one that can be overcome by having better or higher end hardware. They are a direct result of TS3 not having a built in fps limiter like more modern games have, as such would not have been required by nearly as many players in 2007-09 back when the base game engine was designed and generally speaking hardware would not have been capable of working that hard even if it "wanted" to.

"phoebebebe13;c-16413647" wrote:
Not limiting your FPS with this game can overwork your card , overheat the card and shorten the card's lifespan. Yes people have ruined their cards with this game. Screen tearing can be another problem. You should be capping your fps to 60 if your monitor is 60 hz.

the 750 ti is a mid level card. It's also now older . the new 1000 series is much better. You might need a better video card to handle some of the things you want your computer to do. It's not the FPS but the quality and level of your card . Some people run this game on very high end cards so they can add more taxing mods.

@phoebebebe13

Do you think my graphics card will be okay if I play at these settings but still use reshade?

On the nvidia control panel I have now got most things at the default thing but I have FXAA on, triple buffering on, vertical sync at adaptive, virtual reality pre-rendered frames at 1 bc it says higher numbers = higher latency which sounds like it's a bad thing so I set it to the lowest number... Idk if it's relevant to the sims bc that's not VR but someone said they changed that setting for the sims 3 so maybe...

And then in the actual game I have these settings:

Reflections: mirror and water, the second-best setting for reflections
Edge smoothing: off (it doesn't look to do much when it's on, so that's why I let nvidia do it instead)
Visual effects: middle
Lighting and shade: middle
Tree detail: middle
Draw distance (??): high
The amount of very detailed lots at a time is 1
Texture detail is high although I could settle for middle, too
Sim detail is very high
Smooth animation and advanced rendering are on but I could turn smooth animation off bc everybody seems to be confused if that does much
Fullscreen is on
the 60Hz limit thing is on
Object hiding is off

I'd like to maybe use the sharpening shaders that come with reshade but I don't know, do you think it will be better than using the HQ mod because that's not recommended for gameplay and then perhaps I could achieve a similar effect using the shaders? Or would that kill my graphics card.

@SimplyJen

Thankyou for all the info! Just to confirm though, I wouldn't mess up or damage anything if I played with reshade? I personally find the default colours of the game kinda drab, so I'd want to play around with a few things on top of sharpening.

"SimplyJen;c-16413893" wrote:

"Purrdalecki;c-16413882" wrote:
@SimplyJen

Thankyou for all the info! Just to confirm though, I wouldn't mess up or damage anything if I played with reshade? I personally find the default colours of the game kinda drab, so I'd want to play around with a few things on top of sharpening.

You can track temperatures and usage percent with tools like HWmonitor. Get the free version and run this in the background while playing. It's only shortening the lifespan of your hardware if the hardware is being overworked.

@SimplyJen

Sorry, one last question and then I'm out of your hair! What temps and percentages would you suggest are good for:

my CPU
my graphics card

during playing the sims 3, and at what percentage/temperature should I start to worry? Thank you. ^^