Sims 3 Graphics Trouble on Windows 10

@bookwormpizza  The graphics can only look so good no matter what hardware you have.  Part of that is that the game doesn't always show the details of everything on-screen.  One of the graphics settings is high-detail lots, which is the number of lots that get fully rendered at one time, but turning this up is demanding on both a graphics card and on the game engine itself.  (My card could handle all lots being rendered, but I keep high-detail lots at 2 while playing to lower the stress on the game engine.)  However, this doesn't help with the so-called world lot, the rest of the world that's not part of any particular lot.  It's always going to look low-resolution to some extent.

The issue with your graphics chip is that it can only process so much data at once.  When you zoom in and out quickly, or pan the camera, or jump to another lot, there's a large amount of new data that needs to be processed, and that takes time.  It takes more time when using a GPU with a very limited capacity, although here again the game engine is inefficient as well.  So what you might see is that the scene takes a few seconds to come into focus, or even that there are sort of mistakes in rendering certain objects.

The graphics driver being out of date can exacerbate the issue, especially when it doesn't keep up with the operating system.  Your driver crashing was probably not due to the load the graphics chip was carrying but either a mismatch between the driver and OS, or (less likely) some corruption in the driver itself.  Intel is great about keeping its graphics drivers updated, and with good reason.  Your particular driver was tweaked after the fact by Asus to go with your particular laptop, but there again, there's a reason Asus spent the time and resources to release a new driver.  Why this newer driver is better, I couldn't tell you.  But it almost certainly is going to give you at least a small improvement.

If a certain graphics issue bothers you a lot, you can try changing just the one setting that covers it.  Still, that won't allow your GPU to render anything faster, it'll just improve the quality of the image you eventually see, perhaps at the expense of the time it takes you to see that image.  However, the risk is that the chip constantly receives more data than it can process and just doesn't render certain objects properly at all, or even crashes the game.  In more optimized games, you'd just see lower framerates, but Sims 3 is not well-optimized, and this is one of the consequences.

As for your older computer, it may have had a faster graphics card, or at least one with more bandwidth to handle the load Sims 3 was placing on it.  In this case, newer is not always better: the newest high-end cards are faster than anything that existed even five years ago, but the new low-end integrated chips are only better than the old integrated chips.  It's also possible that you got a bit lucky with the HP: that it was built in a way that worked better with Sims 3 than your current one does.  Without knowing its specs, I'm just guessing.

There isn't much you can do to improve overall graphics performance, other than what you've already done.  But one thing that will help is making sure your laptop can cool itself while you play.  Your processor and its integrated GPU will throttle above a certain temperature, dialing back performance to create less heat.  So the lower the temps, the more likely your hardware is to be able to sustain its maximum load.  Anything below 80º C is fine; anything below 70º C is great.