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

@puzzleaddict - You are very welcome.

For me, the 'real' moment of truth will come when I add the remaining expansion and stuff packs. For now, all is running smoothly and well. However, if I should run into any hiccups I will definitely post back to get the word out.

Again, thank you for taking the time to help me.

@puzzleaddict - I have an update as to the performance of the Iris xe card when running the Sims 3. The game still runs well using this card however, there are a few hiccup spots which anyone interested in using this 'card' for the game may want to be aware of. While the game does not truly lag, it does experience moments of brief pauses under certain weather conditions and color combinations.

My Game Changes From Initial Post:
I have added University Life to the game and removed NRaas' Story Progression mod. All other settings are the same.

Differences in Performance: Quick Pauses:
Game performance takes a slight hit when the Fall season begins. Frost, for some reason causes the card to work harder, pc fans comes on but don't overheat my system. The quick pauses (more like a quick 'tick') mainly happens when moving through the world and doesn't affect the animations of the Sims, animals or trees; just how it loads past the 'lot distance'. Otherwise, the Fall season doesn't have an issue. The trees change color and lose leaves all with neither graphic or performance issues in terms of lag or stalls.

I don't know why this is, as there are no issues with snow, hail, heavy rains or, thunderstorms with lightening strikes. But, early morning frost causes a slight (yet noticeable) pause when it comes to loading lots. Sims and animal animations are not altered by the appearance of frost and they play fluidly. It is just the loading of the lots, past the draw distance point which are affected.

Game Performance: Lagging
-Towns/Worlds which are heavily colored in various tones of Green, seem to have moments of actual lagging which have lasted no more than 1-2 seconds. This lag does affect the Sim's animation and it will appear as a jump in motions when it happens. The town of 'Hidden Springs' was where I encountered the most lagging/stalling of the game. Maybe this can be fixed by turning some settings down, truthfully I haven't tried. Other 'Green' worlds such as Riverview did not seem to be affected by this problem under my current settings.

Also, not really certain I can blame this on the card; but it is worth noting. The game spawns too much of everything!

-This is may seem like a minor problem but it is one which is gumming up the routing of my worlds. Because the game will create what it 'thinks' your PC can handle, it has been creating massive multitudes of animals (with litters), gnomes, gems and rocks and even Sims. Because of this, NRaas' Error Trapping mod spends the day unsticking stuck Sims, unrouteable Sims and Sims (or animals) stuck aging. The Sim count for my game is nearing 250 Sims in town (not homeless or visiting)! Sunset Valley alone has over 25 fully grown horses and goodness knows how many foals. Dogs and cats are having many litters and small animals (turtles, snakes, chipmunks, birds....) occupy many footpaths and open areas! Just something to be aware of.

@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.

@puzzleaddict - Thanks for responding. And, thank you for the insight into VRAM limitations.

Overall, I am very happy with the way the Iris xe card (if it's really called that) is able to handle the game. My game loads and saves very fast. As I stated, I haven't encountered any major or enjoyment breaking problems.

You may be on to something where Hidden Springs is concerned, that world is packed with trees, densely in some areas. It also is a tall world (if that makes a difference). I will have to play around with it more to get a better feel for what may be happening there.

Where population is concerned, I pulled NRaas' story progression because I wanted to see what the game did on its own. And also, because not everyone reading this will play with mods in their game; so, I wanted my experiences to reflect what happened under normal gameplay conditions. Since I didn't have an issue running SP untuned, I will be putting it back in play once I see how the entire game plays on this integrated card.

In the future, I will this update this thread only if I come across game breaking problems once Island Paradise & Into the Future are installed and played. For now, it handles Base through University Life (with select stuff packs) extremely well.