The game can't/doesn't want to write cache
Hello everyone. I wrote about this problem on the NRaas forum and they told me that I could just leave a link to my post created there so you could see what we have already discussed a...
Forum Discussion
@bi0hzrd Does it make a difference whether you play in fullscreen or windowed mode? I tested in windowed because I was multi-tasking, and I wouldn't have expected that to make any difference, and the game was also running at a much lower resolution than what my laptop screen supports. That's higher than 1080p, so I could test that too, although I generally play in fullscreen mode at 2560x1440 and don't see this issue.
Did this problem happen before you used the GPU add-on tool, and does it still happen if you repair the game? Doing so would revert your .sgr files, including making your GPU unrecognized again, but that's not a major problem and shouldn't have anything to do with this specific issue.
The problem with reloading a town is a bit unclear to me. I think you're saying that loading times are longer if a few hours have passed, but is there anything else different, for example do the WorldCache files disappear again? That's one reason an initial loading time would be longer than subsequent ones; the other I can think of is that in a new save at least, the game needs to place expansion lots. But that wouldn't be an issue if you're loading an existing save, only a new one.
For the portraits, I see the winking face too sometimes, both with active and inactive sims. I've never really looked into it but have thought that it had to do with the sims' current moods, as the game is calculating them. Or maybe it has to do with some other status, like whether they're being simulated at the moment. But since this has followed me through several computers and hasn't seemed to be correlated to any other issues, I've never worried about it.
@puzzlezaddict I also checked how fast the world would load if I chose a saved game instead of starting a new one. The result is the same – the world loads as if I'm launching it for the very first time.
@bi0hzrd Let me poke around a bit and get back to you.
- @puzzlezaddict Sure, I'll be waiting for your reply.
@bi0hzrd As an experiment, please try setting Dynamic Super Resolution in the Nvidia Control Panel to 1.78, and then to 4, which on a 1080p monitor force the GPU to render the game at 2560x1440 and 3840x2160, respectively. I'm curious whether you see the same results at these resolutions since you don't at lower ones. This isn't a fix, or at least I doubt it would, more of an experiment. You can set DSR for Sims 3 only (TS3.exe for an EA App install, TS3W.exe for a Steam install), under Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings, so as not to affect anything else on your computer.
If you want to go the more drastic route, there's also a DXVK tool that's been helping some other users. I haven't tried it myself, but for those who have, they say the game is more stable and can use more VRAM. That wouldn't directly fix your issue, but it might get around whatever the problem is. In case you want to test it:
https://www.tumblr.com/nornities/751283334185959424/how-to-use-dxvk-with-the-sims-3?source=share
Undoing the changes would be as simple as deleting the added files and repairing the game, so it's not a huge risk.
