Forum Discussion

RussianColeslaw's avatar
6 years ago

Sims have strange lines through their clothes, and when I zoom out their clothes disapear.

I recently aged up my sims to YAS and changed them into CC that hasn't given me issues in the past. Except now, my sims clothes' look they're falling apart and have strange skin tone lines through them. It gets even worse when I zoom out and parts completely vanish. The textures and sims in my game are also very pixelated and blocky all of a sudden. All my graphic settings are on very high except the sims, they're only on high. This issue happens in saved and new games.


I have a Nvidia graphic card, not sure if that's the cause of my issue.


I don't use custom sliders and only have mods that prevent my game from crashing.


Edit: I have a Nvidia Gforce GTX 550 Ti graphics card. Not sure if that meets minimum requirements :neutral:
I also have a Windows 7 64 bit computer with 8 GB of RAM.
  • Different players will experience different things here but a 550Ti is kind of borderline for all EPs. Do you have the heavy hitting ones in play? Those would be Pets and Seasons especially, and then ITF and IP. Also your card would be aging now, probably coming up on eight years old and that's not likely helping.

    Have you updated its graphics drivers recently? Not sure if the older cards in that series are even still getting updates but maybe you landed with one that isn't helping matters either.

    Do things improve if you reduce the graphics settings to medium across the board (maybe put a couple of them back to high later if you can find a middle ground without the distortion), Water/Mirrors turned way down, High Detail Lots set to no more than 2? Does full screen vs. windowed mode make a difference or fiddling around with the game's resolution?

    Perhaps worth trying if none of the above helps, maybe a test run of a new game with all CC removed? There could be one or a few items like high poly count hairs or complicated CAS parts that are just not playing well for you even if they behaved themselves in the past. Also worth mentioning, do you routinely clear (delete) the five cache files on the top level of the TS3 user game folder in Documents?
  • "igazor;c-16913317" wrote:
    Different players will experience different things here but a 550Ti is kind of borderline for all EPs. Do you have the heavy hitting ones in play? Those would be Pets and Seasons especially, and then ITF and IP. Also your card would be aging now, probably coming up on eight years old and that's not likely helping.

    Have you updated its graphics drivers recently? Not sure if the older cards in that series are even still getting updates but maybe you landed with one that isn't helping matters either.

    Do things improve if you reduce the graphics settings to medium across the board (maybe put a couple of them back to high later if you can find a middle ground without the distortion), Water/Mirrors turned way down, High Detail Lots set to no more than 2? Does full screen vs. windowed mode make a difference or fiddling around with the game's resolution?

    Perhaps worth trying if none of the above helps, maybe a test run of a new game with all CC removed? There could be one or a few items like high poly count hairs or complicated CAS parts that are just not playing well for you even if they behaved themselves in the past. Also worth mentioning, do you routinely clear (delete) the five cache files on the top level of the TS3 user game folder in Documents?



    I have all EPS installed as of right now, but I lag and experience lag and frame rate drops the most when it rains, snows, or in the city of Bridgeport or Twinbrook.

    The last time it was updated was around eight months ago, and do to it's age it might just be time to completely replace it. I messed around with other games that are very graphic heavy (like Diablo III, Minecraft to an extent, WOW, Overwatch...) and I notice a very subtle change to the graphics and lag. Every game just looks off.


    I freshly installed my game again with all EPS, added the same CC back but with no mods or store content. (I saved my original mods folder and saved games so it's all good :smile: )

    I had the same issue, but this time it was worse. I even put my game on the lowest settings like you suggested. I tried again with some basic CC items from trusted CC creators and nothing :neutral: Then I tried with absolutely no CC and just vanilla. Nope!

    I'm pretty sure it's my graphics card at this point... have any suggestions for a new one that can handle all EPS? I know they can be fairly expensive, but I'm willing to drop a reasonable amount do to how much money and content I already put into my current computer.

  • Bridgeport is a poor world for testing because it's difficult to work around inactive sims all across town getting stuck in elevators and instantiating inside of LN apartment NPC-only units unable to get out thus causing routing issues. Twinbrook though is known to be gentle to play as would be Sunset Valley and Riverview. From what you have described, yes I think this card is aging out on you and the Pets/Seasons combo is just too much for it now, as are some other GPU intensive games.

    On the more current range of Nvidia cards, for a desktop a GTX 1050/1050Ti or the AMD equivalents should be fine. A 1060 would be stronger, any higher than that and I believe any in the newest 2000 series would provide more strength than TS3 would ever need as the program can only utilize 800 MB of vram. But other games could benefit from going higher. Note though that the stronger cards, any of these, require more power to run and generate more heat so one has to be sure that the computer's PSU and cooling systems can handle them. Your CPU also needs to be strong enough to avoid bottlenecking, what has it got for a processor?
  • That processor should be strong enough if I'm getting the right specs on it, but I would again be concerned about its age and its ability to handle other intensive games. Perhaps we should page someone who actually knows what she is doing with respect to system builds and upgrades. :)
    @chesterbigbird
  • "igazor;c-16913501" wrote:
    Bridgeport is a poor world for testing because it's difficult to work around inactive sims all across town getting stuck in elevators and instantiating inside of LN apartment NPC-only units unable to get out thus causing routing issues. Twinbrook though is known to be gentle to play as would be Sunset Valley and Riverview. From what you have described, yes I think this card is aging out on you and the Pets/Seasons combo is just too much for it now, as are some other GPU intensive games.

    On the more current range of Nvidia cards, for a desktop a GTX 1050/1050Ti or the AMD equivalents should be fine. A 1060 would be stronger, any higher than that and I believe any in the newest 2000 series would provide more strength than TS3 would ever need as the program can only utilize 800 MB of vram. But other games could benefit from going higher. Note though that the stronger cards, any of these, require more power to run and generate more heat so one has to be sure that the computer's PSU and cooling systems can handle them. Your CPU also needs to be strong enough to avoid bottlenecking, what has it got for a processor?


    Processor wise, I have and Intel (R) Core i5-2320 CPU @ 3.00 GHz. I'm also thinking about replacing the motherboard as a whole.