Re: Sims 3: Unable to identify hardware/Video card not recognized.

I tried running sims 3 as admin and I received those two warnings at start up, same as when i made a local account.  i also disabled Controlled folder access through settings.

@Alizarin214  Sorry for the late reply.  The second message is normal for graphics cards that aren't in the game's database, and it shouldn't affect your ability to play.  The first message might still be a problem though.  Can you load a save, and if so, how does it look?

If you can load a save at all, please do so and put the game in windowed mode, open the Task Manager, and let me know what kind of GPU load and temperature you see.  If you can't load a save, do this at the Main Menu, although the load should be pretty low there.

@Alizarin214  That's great to hear.  Do you know which step or steps helped you specifically?  I'd like to be able to tell the next person with your issue, which is uncommon but not unheard-of.

Hi, 

I might be experiencing the same issue and I'm trying to resolve it. I recently brought a gaming laptop with a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU. I installed my Sims 3 packs from my Origin account. Upon launching the game, I got the "Unable to identity hardware" and "Unrecognized Video Card" warning; the worlds were greyed out; and the game completely froze during gameplay after CAS. I attempted to run it in the appropriate compatibly mode. That didn't work. Changed the vertical sync in the NVIDIA Control Panel to "On" for the TS3.exe file (running 1.69 patch) as suggested by other forums. That didn't work. So lastly, I checked the DeviceConfig file and it only has 2 lines:

 === Options ===
=== Default Options ===

I'm not super tech-savy so I'm desperate to figure out what to do to get my game to run properly at this point. Please let me know if you can help. 

Thanks,

@teedr23  Please run a dxdiag and attach it to a post.

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

Please also let me know what antivirus you use, if any.

Thanks for the prompt response.

See attached. Currently using TotalAV. 

@teedr23  Please update the driver for your Nvidia graphics card.  It's more than a year old, and your dxdiag lists a few crashes of the Nvidia Control Panel.  You can get the newest driver here:

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/192968/en-us/

Restart your computer after installing and before trying to play.

It that doesn't help, please set exceptions for TS3.exe, Sims3Launcher.exe, and Origin.exe in your antivirus.

Done. Still having the "Unable to identify hardware error". 

I don't think the antivirus is an issue since I just got it today. I've been having this issue with Sims since I got the laptop in June.  I added TS3.exe, SimsLaucher.exe, and Origin.exe to the excluded files in the TotalAV antivirus scans and real time protection if that's how you're supposed to set exceptions (See screenshots).  

Update 8/30: Got it to work properly following the step you noted in #4. Just made a local account on the laptop and everything is working!

@teedr23  That's great to hear.  Sometimes permissions or other settings can get borked in the main user account, and it can often be easier to create a new account than to try to figure out the exact problem in the main account.  Let me know if you run into any more trouble.