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 and what conclusions we have reached. Here is the link: https://www.nraas.net/community/chatterbox/topic13527
By the way, igazor sends greetings to the volunteer Puzzlezaddict. 🙂
@bi0hzrd Let me poke around a bit and get back to you.
@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.
@bi0hzrd I would find it fascinating if using DSR was what fixed the icons, so please test that and DEP separately and let me know what you find. (DEP shouldn't be necessary anyway, but now I'm curious.)
For the world loading times, it's pretty clear that the WorldCache folder is the issue, but not why the game isn't reading it. I'd suggest testing without DXVK just to make sure this isn't a side effect of that utility—it's very new, at least in terms of wider use, and any problems with it aren't well-documented yet. Deleting the files and repairing the game is enough to revert the changes, although that would revert your .sgr files as well as anything else in the program files, so make backups if you don't want to redo any edits you've applied.
If you've made other edits too, please skip them for at least one round of testing. That applies to any .sgr edits not directly related to getting your GPU recognized as well. I realize that it's kind of a hassle to set everything up just the way you like it, but this is such an odd error, with no known cause I can find that we haven't already covered, it's time to eliminate as many variables as possible.
I'd also suggest trying to play with your computer completely offline. And just for fun, see how much this mod decreases a new save's initial loading time (Sims Asylum, so you'd need to sign in to download it):
Some of that first loading time is directly related to placing these lots, although not all of it. So I'd like to know how much of the problem is this and how much is the WorldCache data not being read.
