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Karu250's avatar
5 years ago

PC Sims 3 is Large Address Aware?

For the longest time I've had issues with sims 3 for years. Countless attempts at trying to minimize this inexplicable lag I've have. I've tried everything from installing Nraas Mods countless tweaks, upgrading hardware components and while it has helped. I do get steady 60 fps in most cases but there's always this micro stutter, or this jerking lag when doing certain things like going throughout the neighborhood on foot. I've heard that at the end of the day Sims 3 just isn't all that optimized, but I think I found the issue for my problem, the trouble is I don't know what to do about it.


For starters, I know what Large Address Aware is it basically enables executables if supported to use higher than 2GB of ram if you have the ram and the system architecture to allow it. Which I do as I have a Windows 10 64bit with as of recently 24GB of RAM which sounds like over kill for the sims 3, but I didn't get it specifically for that, but for other games I've played recently. Which is when I had an idea.to just try the game again after installing the extra ram. And as expected viewing through task manager the game itself is not even stressing my system in the slightest, with Sims 3 being likely the second oldest game on my PC, but I could run more modern games like Fallout 4 with mods with no issues in performance and some recent games with much less hiccups on high settings. Yet Sims 3 still seems to perform objectively worse in performance despite for all intents and purposes it shouldn't.

And while I appologize for the lengthy initial posts, I wanted to convey just how baffling it has been to get sufficient performance, almost as baffling as this drive I have in pursuing to resolve it. Though I'll get to the point, as far as I know the Sims 3 Supposedly has been LAA ever sense the late night patch. I have the most recent patch as well as every expansion up to Into The Future, and a couple of stuff packs and I think I have one disabled, yet when I view the game in task manager, it seems to barely cross the 2GB mark in RAM usage if it even reaches it. I do have mods and CC but it doesn't seem like it's making much of a difference even tried without some of them and still seems to not make much of a difference. Though to my point if my game was functioning truly with LAA wouldn't the ram usage actually increase to accommodate the demands the game needs? I had some experince making other games use more ram like some games in the Fallout series with their modding needs and the memory consumption actually begins to compensate, but for some reason Sims 3 or atleast mine in particular won't use past 2GB. Though if it could I think it would finally solve these harsh lag spikes I have despite other wise very good performance.

Edit: This is the resource usage: http://prntscr.com/rsh07p

5 Replies

  • You are correct in that TS3 has been LAA on Windows ever since Patch 1.17 (the one released alongside of Late Night). Only the Mac version of the game is currently not. There is no safe way I know of to force the game to use more than the amount of RAM it "thinks" it needs at any given point. I'll use my own game(s) as an example, though this matches what others experience. Newer, smaller, less progressed worlds, especially those used as vacation destinations only, will rarely reach for more than 1.4 to 1.8 GB. As the population increases, the worlds grow in complexity and we add content to them, RAM usage will usually also increase on its own. My more complicated worlds will reach leveling off points sometimes upwards of 3 GB when they are ready to. But once LAA, there is no longer any kind of magic threshold at 2 GB where something special has to take place in order for RAM usage to increase.

    I see a dxdiag posted here in your past, but it was quite a while ago. May I ask what you have for a graphics card currently? Can we see a fresh dxdiag report, perhaps?

    And in addition, in case you are not familiar with it we do offer this page at NRaas. Not all of the solutions and tips listed involve mods, although some do.
    http://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE
  • I figured, I do notice things are a bit easier in vacation worlds or the future one. But I figured in a way RAM sort of gives it more breathing room that it could use if needed. But if it does need it or I assumed it does then why is it not? Which was my train of thought. Either way, thanks and here's my more recent dxdiag. The one you may have viewed likely had much more dated specs.

    (Well I tried posting my Dxdiag in text form but it seems to excede the forum's character limit by a wide range. Is there another way to post it?)

    Though as for my graphics card now? It's a NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti with 4GB memory. Processor is still the same unless that older report was on an older computer.
  • The best way to share a dxdiag is to send it up to Pastebin (the free version is fine) and share a link to it. But the one from your past I was reading featured an Nvidia GT 720 I think it was. A GTX 1050Ti should be more than adequate to service this game even with all EPs in play.

    If I could, instead I would like to see the first 40 lines of your DeviceConfig.log sent by Private Message (PM). This is a file to be found in your TS3 user game folder in Documents. Just the beginning parts, not the long lists of game options that follow. Possibly you have the dreaded 32 MB texture override happening, which on your card is totally not necessary, and we can get that fixed if so.

    There will always be some camera stutter with this game, especially on modern hardware. Actual full-on lag is where the game clock keeps stalling with animations that continue but actual gameplay is frozen, then it lurches forward for a few sim minutes only to stall again to the point where the game is not really playable. It doesn't sound like what you are experiencing really rises to that level, though.
  • The camera stutter may just be a pet peave, though I do get full on stalling with animations. Like if a sim jogging through the neighborhood or something every other stride becomes jerky, like there's a pause mid stride then it tries to speed up as if it was out of sync for a bit. And continues to do so. Basically like you described towards the end of your last post.

    It doesn't seem to be so bad at the home lot, mostly due to them not having to runabout, but there still is these pauses the game does. My guess the issue only compounds when it's trying to render the rest of the neighborhood when they're out and about.
  • Sorry to have left you hanging there, it's been a very odd couple of days on my end (odd even for the current real world situation).

    The only unusual things I see from the fresh dxdiag is that your graphics card drivers are newer than the version of Win 10 that you are running, and your system is having trouble updating Windows. I can't say that would cause game lag necessarily, but perhaps you might want to address the Windows Update issues if you can?

    The DeviceConfig.log is fine, your graphics card is formally recognized and you do not have the texture memory override. That report usually does get the version of Windows wrong since the game pre-dates Win 10, but it's odd to see it misidentified as Win XP. You mentioned having used compatibility settings, those should be undone entirely as they hurt the game more than they could possibly help it.

    A few things I see that I forgot to ask before diving into hardware and system reports:
    -- Which world(s) are you playing in? Does the jerky play/stutter vary depending on which world(s) you are playing and does a freshly started game in a known to be gentle world (Sunset Valley, Riverview, Twinbrook) play any differently, at least for a while?

    -- Are you running the game at any speed other than the lowest (Normal)?

    -- As per the usual lists of recommended things we can do to relieve stress on the game, have or do you play offline (not logged in at the Launcher or in-game levels), disallowed the in-game TS3 Store shopping experience, switched off the hidden object startup game?

    -- You did mention NRaas mods, but do you have the often recommended ones in play that are specifically designed to help improve and preserve game performance? Those would be Overwatch and ErrorTrap as the big first two, then Register, Traffic, to an extent GoHere, and MasterController for its ability to do a Reset Everything from the Town menu at City Hall every few sim weeks or so.

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