Sims 3 Crashes

The biggest favor you can do your system, which hopefully you have long since taken care of, is to arrange for vertical sync and cap the frame rates for TS3. Being an older game, it has no functional built-in fps limiter and your graphics card is powerful enough to run wild on them which can lead to graphics glitches, lag, screen tears, crashes, and can ultimately damage the card and the system board to which it is attached. In-game frame rates can be checked with the "fps on" cheat code; as you play and move the game camera around, they should never exceed the refresh rate of your monitor. Most monitors are 60 Hz, so that means 60 fps, some can run higher.

Beyond that, with lots of sim creating and CAS editing especially, you might be routinely exceeding the resource usage that the game can handle. It's still a 32-bit goose no matter how we dress it up and it will never soar like a 64-bit eagle by today's standards. Do you check on RAM usage frequently throughout these gameplay/design sessions and are you typically anywhere in the danger zone of over 3.5GB of usage on TS3 alone before this happens? If RAM usage is not the issue, we also offer this page full of tips and tricks to help the game's performance along, in case you are not familiar with it.
http://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE

By the way, I play on a Mac. But the trick there is that I don't play the actual Mac version of TS3 which is what is more crippled, like so many others I have Bootcamped Windows onto it and play the Windows version of the game on that side of things. :)

Some Mac models are built very well for gaming (up to a point), others not so much, but this is not a game that is made well for even the higher end ones. EA made some odd decisions with TS3's development and never went back to reverse them; the Mac versions of TS1, 2 and 4 are fine but of course this is all a bit beside the point now.

On the Nvidia Control Panel, on a profile for TS3.exe (for Patch 1.69) or TS3w.exe (with the "w" for 1.67) yes on Adaptive or On for vertical sync (whichever one works better) and also On for Triple Buffering. To find out what the refresh rate of your monitor is, right-click on the desktop, then Display Settings and Advanced. The Refresh Rate is one of about six things that show up there and it will be measured in Hz. That is the goal for the upper limit of frame rates (fps).

To see what you are actually getting in-game, Ctrl+Shift+C to bring up the cheats console, then type fps on (enter). As you play and move the game camera around, the displayed frame rate should never exceed 60 or whatever the Refresh Rate of your monitor is. To make the rate display go away, cheats console again and type fps off (enter).

If vertical sync isn't enough to lock things in, then we move on to adding an additional tool such as Nvidia Inspector to force the frame rate capping. This one requires a (free) download and install first though and is often but not always necessary. Note that vertical sync will never work in windowed mode, only in full screen, while Inspector will work on both.

@igazor I do try to check on RAM as I go, although sometimes I lose track of time. All in all that seems ok. It is also true that the more I do CAS, the more the game seems to crash.

I will say I have no idea what you mean by arranging for vertical sync and capping frame rates, so it would be helpful if you would explain that to me please! My technical abilities only go so far.

A good few years ago I downloaded bootcamp on my old Mac, and before that I added extra RAM to my computer. I found that I hadn’t allocated enough space to the bootcamp drive, and it was all a bit of a mess for me to do myself at the time. I have now bought this desktop which is a lot easier for me, and use my new Mac for general work things - as Macs most certainly weren’t built for gaming.

Thank you for taking the time to help me!

@igazor After a little bit of research, I’ve changed the vertical sync to “adaptive” in the NVIDIA control panel. Hopefully this is what you meant

update please ea please