@mw1525 I would love to hear how Sims 3 runs on this system. As you said, its graphics capabilities are very similar to what your laptop has, and the info you provided a year ago was very helpful. Among other things, I linked your thread to someone who was looking at similar systems and was on a budget, and they've since bought a laptop with the same graphics chip. They're quite happy with the outcome. So it would be great to another reference from someone who knows Sims 3 as well as you do.
And you're right, your only option for a dedicated card here would be an external one, plugged into the fastest USB port. But that's not a great option for a couple of reasons. The ifrst is price: the external enclosure the card would need can cost around $250. The second is that eGPUs perform significantly worse than their internal counterparts, so you'd need a faster card than Sims 3 requires otherwise.
Anyway, let me know if you have more questions, and I'm looking forward to whatever info you have to share.
@mw1525 The # and space in front of setb is code-speak for "ignore this line." In this case, that section of graphicscards.sgr says, by default:
If you [game] don't detect any video memory
set the texture memory to 32 MB
set texture memory detected to false [the result is the OVERRIDE]
The edits make the second line say 1024 MB and void the third line enirely. So I can't think of any way that the edits you made to this section would have the effect you're describing.
What might help is instead running the GPU Add-on Support tool from NexusMods. You'd need a (free) account to download it, and it would make several changes to graphicsrules, not just the ones you did. I've heard from other players with AMD cards, mostly dedicated cards and definitely not your model of iGPU, that this works better than the usual edits, although most of them have been complaining about missing shadows and other details rather than an inability to zoom in.
The tool gets updated all the time, apparently, and I haven't kept up, so I don't know what current changes there are aside from adding more cards to the files. But one or another of those edits may fix your issue as well.
The other thing you could try is copying the options.ini from your laptop to this machine. You'd need to replace the lastdevice line from the old file with the line from the new one—this lists the graphics driver, and when it doesn't match what the game detects, the entire options.ini gets reset. But everything else should work, and maybe that would restore the missing in-game options.
@mw1525 My miss print - a standard video card whether half height or regular requires a PCIe slot. Preferably a PCIe X16 slot to take full advantage of the video card. Your computer does not have a PCIe slot. Any other way of connecting a off the shelf video card to that machine is uncharted territory of unsupported hardware modifications NOT supported by the manufacturer. In the good old days this was not uncommon as as schematics were usually provided (or obtainable) from the manufacturer., I liked the one I saw that used the M.2 slot but that would require converting the M.2 slot to PCIe and an external power supply for the video card and running the computer without the cover unmodified. IMO the manufacturer would not support this mod for various reasons. I have a Dell 660s (SFF) which DOES have a PCIe slot and works just fine with a half height video card that doesn't exceed the 220W power supply. I use it for a media client - not gaming. Your situation is quite different. My old gaming machine has a AMD FX6100 cpu that does not have an integrated video chip and my new one in progress has a AMD 5600X cpu which does not have an integrated video chip. Your computer can not have an off the shelf video card because the manufacturer did not engineer a proper interface. What this means you are expected to use the integrated video chip in the AMD processor. At the time of the release of Sins 3 I believe AMD did not have a cpu with integrated graphics and they acquired ATI some time later. I would be very interested in the AMD Ryzen 9 4900H processor temperature after playing some 3D graphical games for a while.
