I see. I'm all too aware the performance of sims 3 being infamous for stuttering no matter what, but I'll definitely keep that in mind. I will follow all your tips for the sims, and yeah will make sure to take it much slower in future, one change at a time. I'll also make backups of course.
Edit: Also yes, I have installed smoothpatch in the past, that was part of the guide I followed, and I believe it helped noticeably.
As for control, thank you, I will look into directx. And I will check a dedicated forum there. The game used to play smoothly so I was worried it was not a game specific issue, but rather a general problem with my graphics drivers. But if nothing can be troubleshooted deeper for that general problem, I will take a look at game specific forums. I think I can finally lay to rest perhaps graphics drivers being the problem, because that was something I could not let go of.
Edit: Oh I will also mention that earlier in the year, last year perhaps, I wiped my laptop and somewhat forcefully reinstalled windows 10, since my window to downgrade from windows 11 had passed. Windows 11 gave me issues, to some of my apps and games if I remember right. Do you think this wipe might've caused issues, if the drivers aren't the cause of issues. And do you think it might be worthwhile to reinstall windows again but with a more methodical, clean reinstall bc perhaps I did not do it that way last time? Would that also fix all driver issues and let me start afresh.
I'll also look into my memory. I did not realize that was unusually high, even at 30%. I will look into troubleshooting that in general. I will try disabling all startup apps just to see, then slowly enable some I find essential one by one. I have a sync service running, for one of my note taking software, so maybe that might be it.
This is my final simple question. I've attached below an image of the nvidia driver download page. What were the options you selected, just so I know the right driver to always install in future.