5 years ago
Random Crash to Desktop
My game has been working the best way it could for the last couple of days with nearly no freezes except Overwatch 3 AM cleaning; however, it started random crashes to desktop today and this last one...
I know where you’re coming from, and I also research a lot to conserve my game performance, but my Alpine County save normally runs using between 2 - 2.5 GB’s of RAM (sometimes even below or a little bit higher). I like to unpark my CPU set Sims 3’s priority to high from Task Manager, and when I do, I see that the game uses more of the CPU, and that might be why the RAM use in such a packed world doesn’t approach 3 GB. I posted the issue because this was clearly a RAM spike, because again, I wasn’t even placing a lot - I was just hovering my cursor over two Community Lots from an Expansion Pack while the game was using around 2.3 GB of RAM.
My problem is about the random RAM spikes, and I can’t find fixes for that - I just keep wishing to find a way to limit the game’s RAM use to some value like 3.5 GB. The game crashes once it reaches 3.7 GB but still recognizes 4 Gigabytes of VRAM which is super annoying.
@Darens-Stuff The game can't actually use 4 GB of VRAM, only 800 MB. By that I mean video memory, as opposed to system memory. The term "virtual memory" is misused by the game here; the important point is that it can only use 4 GB minus some overhead of system memory, since it can only use 2^32 memory addresses. By the way, the overhead is at least in part due to the cost of translating certain 32-bit instructions for a 64-bit OS: most instructions don't need to be translated at all, but those that do cost extra resources. The translation process is called thunking.
Anyway, there's nothing you can do to entirely prevent the RAM spikes, and one of these spikes was clearly the issue here. Whatever the Task Manager was saying at the time, the game ran out or thought it ran out of memory according to its own report. Maybe it didn't properly release the data for the lots you were checking out; Sims 3 definitely has issues with RAM leaks. Maybe something else happened in the background. I don't know that there's any way to tell. And there certainly isn't a way to force-limit the game's memory use without also causing it to crash when it hits that limit.
I see. I also got the RAM and VRAM mixed up while going back and forth to DeviceConfig haha.
Today it did not crash, and the animations became even smoother. It's really unexpected how the game will act, so I guess I will just cross fingers each time.