Re: How do I get The Sims 3 to play using Intel's Iris xe graphic card?

@mw1525  I think the low settings in the second default profile are due to the GPU memory now being rated 1.  I'm guessing you undid the texture memory change, or else started with a fresh graphicsrules that didn't have the change at all.  In case it's easier than looking it up, this is the edit you want to make, 8-10 lines from the top:

if ($textureMemory == 0)
  seti textureMemory       1024
  # setb textureMemorySizeOK false

But you can of course use whatever graphics settings you'd like, as long as you're happy with the overall performance.

What I most want to hear about are how the game runs during inclement weather (rain/snow/hail) and when there are long-haired pets or horses on-screen.  In-game framerates can be useful as a measure of how hard your GPU has to work to render each frame, both during high-stress scenarios and overall, and of course please let me know if you see any crashes.  If your card can handle the most demanding features of Pets and Seasons, then it should be able to handle everything else without any trouble.

@mw1525  Yes, that was great, thanks.  In fact, it was more than I felt like I could ask of you, but it's definitely the kind of evaluation I was hoping I'd read.  And it's wonderful to hear your game is running so well on a graphics chip that's a lot more accessible, whether in price or the size and weight of the laptop, than a gaming laptop would be.

If you do happen to see any issues, please let me know, but it sounds like your laptop might be completely fine.

@mw1525  Thanks so much for the update.  I don't know enough about how Sims 3 works under the hood to be sure, but it sounds like one of two things may be happening, or perhaps both.  One is that frost takes extra resources to calculate: whether it appears, on what objects, etc.  That would explain the brief pause before the game goes back to running (mostly) smoothly.  The fans coming on also suggests that the processor may be working harder in those moments, although it would take hardware monitoring to confirm.

The other is that it takes more VRAM to render.  Since the game can only use 800 MB, when there's more data that needs to be in video memory, something else has to drop: the game can't hold all the data it wants to use at once.  So the more VRAM the nearby lots and landscape require, the more often the game will need to load and unload data as it switches among them.

This second issue might get better if you lower object and tree detail, but then the game wouldn't look as pretty, and in worlds where the pauses are the only performance issue, it sounds like the tradeoff might not be worth it.

As for Hidden Springs, I wonder whether it uses textures that take more resources to render.  I haven't really played in it myself, although I've loaded it to look around and to test a few things, so I don't really know.  But here again, you could try turning down the settings to see what happens.  If you change one at a time, you might get a better sense of what's causing the problems, for example maybe it's a type of tree that's common in HS and is extra demanding when tree detail is set to the max; or maybe it's the lighting, and in that case you might be able to use a lighting mod to alleviate the issue without lowering any settings.  But it's a lot of work to experiment that much, and I wouldn't blame you if you shrugged and played somewhere else.

As for the animals, the booming population (and accompanying routing errors) would probably drag down performance on any system.  In your position, I'd use NRaas SP to stop immigration and new pets and Register to limit the strays.  If SP is too heavy overall, you could run it on Snail and increase the lengths of the cycles for the various managers even further; I believe the Careers manager is the most demanding.  You could also use igazor's trick of pulling out the fridges in unoccupied houses: sims won't move into a house without one.

Hello!

   I have just bought a new laptop that has an 11th Gen i5 with Iris Xe GPU, so might I ask for your GraphicsRules and GraphicsCards files to save me from the hassle :P