I tried the Alderlake patch with no improvement, all of my sims files are stored on my D drive. I have a Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 graphics card in a ROG laptop. Processor is an Intel Core i7 - 8th gen. Would love to play these games for the nostalgia, plays sims 4 no problem with lots of expansions and CC.
Adirtylittlepig Please repair both games to undo the effects of the Alder Lake patch. It's no longer necessary for Sims 3 at all when the game is installed through the EA App, but more relevantly, the issue never affected older Intel processors, only some of those 12th-gen and newer. And the patch only ever fixed a startup issue, nothing to do with performance after that.
For the issue itself, please provide a dxdiag. Click Windows key-R, enter dxdiag in the run box, wait for the scan to finish, click "Save all information," and save the file to your desktop. From there, you can attach it to a reply using the paper clip (Attachment) icon included with the other formatting buttons.
Please also let me know whether you've taken steps to manually limit your in-game framerates in either game. It's necessary for both games, as they don't have a native fps limiter.
Gotcha, repaired both games. My FPS is limited to 60 through Nvidia, I just downloaded the Nvidia app as well. Attached the dxdiag, thank you so much for helping!
Adirtylittlepig Please update the drivers for your GPUs. The Intel driver doesn't need to be up to date, but your version is from 2018 and may not play well with Windows 11 or a current Nvidia driver. Your Nvidia driver is over two years old, which is fine for Sims 3 itself but not necessarily for Windows and everything else that's still updating. Here are the newest drivers:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/134906/intel-core-i78750h-processor-9m-cache-up-to-4-10-ghz/downloads.html
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/245673/
Install the Intel driver first, restart, and then install the Nvidia driver and restart again. Run each installer as an admin: right-click the download and select "Run as administrator." You may need to reapply the fps cap afterwards, so check before opening Sims 3.
Please test a new save in Sunset Valley and let me know what kind of performance issues, if any, you see. Please test with no mods or custom content at first. If it's easier, you can move or rename the existing Sims 3 folder in Documents > Electronic Arts to allow the game to generate a new one with no content. Then you can delete the new one and restore the old one when you want to restore your user data.
The idea here is to set a baseline for performance, then explore further from there. If the game runs great in SV with no added content, you can start testing the mods and cc you want to use, or try a different world, but not at the same time—keep things simple for now. If you do see a performance issue, we'll know it's not about your added content and can look elsewhere.
I understand that Sims Medieval is also a problem, and it wouldn't use any of the Sims 3-related content, but it's such a different game, and one that I don't deal with normally, that I don't want to make any assumptions or skip any steps in testing.
Did both of these things but still having the same issue. :( The game still runs for a few minutes lag free and then randomly freezes. I can't even get task manager to pull up, I have to sign out of the computer in order to close the game. Both games are limited to 60 FPS through the NVIDIA control panel.
Adirtylittlepig Then I'd like to look over the results of some hardware monitoring, to see whether there's an obvious hardware issue. I'm not saying there is, only that it's worth checking at this point. If you're interested, download hwinfo (it's free) from here:
https://www.hwinfo.com/download/
You don't need to install anything; just choose the Portable version, unzip it, and launch it from Downloads or wherever you like. If you do want the full installer, be sure to click the button for hwinfo itself, not for lansweeper.
Restart your computer, open hwinfo, choose Sensors Only, and click the button that's a sheet of paper with a + to start logging. Save the log file to your desktop for easy access. Wait five minutes, then open Sims 3 and play until it freezes. Don't alt-tab out of the game or run any other programs, aside from the EA App of course, while you're testing. When you're done, click the same button to stop the logging; or if your entire computer freezes again and you need to sign out, the log should be intact up until that point.
Please upload the log to the third-party filesharing site of your choice (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and link it for me. Either leave it in .csv format or, if you're going to use OneDrive, create a .zip file, and don't open the log before uploading it, or else my log reader might not be able to interpret it.
