The game does recognize my card fine, but it decided to reset my graphics to all low just for fun. Fixed everything, but can't change my resolution without the game freezing up. Is there a way to do this in the games files or something?
Yes, you can edit options.ini, in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 3, to set your preferred resolution. Crtl-f and search for "resolution" without quotes, and you'll find the value, for example mine says this:
resolution = 1920 1200 0
The zero at the end, or whatever you see, is irrelevant.
By the way, does the game freeze if you switch to windowed mode before changing the resolution? That's another approach, and you can switch back to fullscreen once you've set your resolution to what you want.
If this doesn't help, please make sure you don't have any other applications trying to "optimize" your in-game settings, for example Nvidia's GeForce Experience. This would interfere with your attempts to change any graphics settings and could be causing the freeze.
By the way, the game resets the options.ini file whenever it detects a new graphics driver, so that may explain why your options were reset. However, if your options are now on low, that suggests that your card is being rated improperly. If you're still having trouble with this, please post the first 40 or so lines of deviceconfig.log, also in the Sims 3 folder; stop when you get to Options. You can delete your user and computer names, about 20 lines down; the file doesn't contain any other identifying information.
I don't think that Adrenaline is interfering with Sims 3's settings, at least not the way you've set it up. There's no equivalent to GFE's check box to optimize settings, as far as I can see, and the only option currently enabled ("Surface format optimization") is something that might not even have an equivalent in-game. You can try disabling that if you want, but I'm not sure it's going to help.
Instead, I'd suggest trashing your current options.ini and letting the game generate a new one, then seeing whether you have more success changing the resolution. Please do so at the Main Menu, not while you have a save loaded, then (if the game doesn't freeze) quit to desktop before loading a save. The same applies for changing any other graphics settings.
Your graphics card isn't recognized, which is not really a problem. (It's being used by the game but is not in the database.) If you'd like to change that, I can help you manually edit the .sgr files, or you can use this tool from NexusMods:
https://www.nexusmods.com/thesims3/mods/106
You'd need a (free) account to download it.
If none of this helps, please let me know whether OneDrive is running, and also whether you use a third-party antivirus, and which one.
Do you have any Razer software installed? Cortex, Chroma, anything like that could be an issue. If so, try uninstalling it.
If that doesn't help, or you don't have any Razer software, try using RivaTuner Statistics Server to manually limit in-game framerates, that is if you haven't already. It's a free download as well, at the bottom of this page:
This is a helpful step anyway because your graphics card is fast enough to generate wildly high framerates and give itself an unnecessarily high workload in the process. But I'm also mentioning it because someone else with an AMD card reported what may be exactly the same issue a couple of weeks ago, and I'm not sure whether the solution was getting rid of their Razer software or limiting fps. Here's the thread, if you're curious; it also has instructions for using RTSS, in case that's helpful:
The one time I tried using Adrenaline to limit framerates, it didn't work properly, but that was a full year ago. But if you want to try that first, the relevant setting would be "wait for vertical refresh." And if using that turns the game's UI purple, as it did for me, enable Custom Color, change the setting, and then revert the change and disable the feature; that fixed my issue when almost nothing else did.
As far as AVG is concerned, it's not usually a problem with Sims 3, but it's always possible the software is blocking some kinds of changes to the game's user folder. You can set exceptions for TS3.exe and Origin.exe (both if you have an Origin install) or TS3W.exe (with the W, disc or Steam install) as described in this guide. It was written for Sims 4, but the relevant settings are the same.
Yay, thanks so much, I can finally play again! Odd if it was razer cortex since it's been fine til now but who knows. Also really appreciate sims 3 resetting every single setting including age span, because that makes complete sense to do. I use lazy duchess' smooth patch so I thought I should apply the rtss there but I guess not so I'll have to do that again. Now my only issue is that weird white flashing which I haven't done the fix you suggested since I haven't played since then
I play in windowed already. If I try to change to fullscreen it freezes also. That would explain why it reset yeah! It could be the optimization thing actually yeah, new drivers have a new feature AMD: adrenaline. Here's that
Not quite sure how to make it not mess with my game if this is the issue Device config: === Application info === Name: Sims3 Version: Build: Release === Rating info === GPU: 5 GPU Memory: 1 CPU: 4 RAM: 4 CPU Speed: 3394 Threading: 3 Adjusted CPU: 4126 RAM: 16310 Adjusted RAM: 15798 Cores: 16 === Machine info === OS version: Windows 8 6.2.9200 OS prod type: 0 OS major ver: 6 OS minor ver: 2 OS SP major ver: 0 OS SP minor ver: 0 OS is 64Bit: 1 CPU: AuthenticAMD Brand: AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Eight-Core Processor Family: 15 Model: 1 Cores: 16 HT: 0 x64: 0 Memory: 16310MB Free memory: 8278MB === Graphics device info === Number: 0 Name (driver): Radeon RX 590 Series Name (database): Radeon RX 590 Series Vendor: ATI Chipset: Vendor: 1002, Device: 67df, Board: 95871682, Chipset: 00e1 Driver: aticfx32.dll, Version: 30.0.15021.7000, GUID: D7B71EE2-249F-11CF-6A6E-2A8F4EC2D335 Driver version: 7000 Monitor: \\.\DISPLAY1 Texture memory: 32MB <> Vertex program: 3.0 Pixel program: 3.0 Hardware TnL: 1
Huh. Deleted it and when I opened sims 3 it was flashing back bars across the screen and wasn't loading at all. When I opened task manager to close it it returned to its tiny windowed mode (screen was entirely black tho) resolution is still resolution = 1024 768 60 in my options.ini. I have AVG and one drive isn't running
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