It's not just you. I see it in my game too. I'm not sure what causes it and it can be annoying due to the time it takes for the portraits to load. And if I open the relationship panel, all the portraits have to reload there. If your sims have met a lot of other sims, that actually takes longer to load those than the portraits in map view for me most of the time. I don't think it's CC related though. Idk for sure, but I think it might be more dependent on the number of households and sims you have rather than anything else. More sims and households simply means that there are more portraits to update and load on startup. The more you have, the slower it will be to get all of them loaded.
And if you delete the localthumbcache file, which holds all the portraits in your save, then it takes even longer as the game has to regenerate every single one plus all the icons for the cooking menus, etc., the build catalog and CAS catalog.
The thing I have noticed though, is that lag in my game is much better than it has been, and I typically run now with higher FPS once I get through the initial loading of the save and the household I chose to play. It might start slow but after a few minutes, it picks up and the game plays smoothly. For me, that's a big improvement over what it has been at times in the past. Although, on occasion, I do have to quit and reload the game to get better FPS.
But tbh, I don't think the game is causing some or even most of that. I have found that if I start the game with other programs running, then my game loads and runs slower and I have FPS issues that will cause me to quit and restart, sometimes multiple times. If I start the game first before starting anything else, then I usually don't have any problems that way. I think what happens is that other apps will grab resources that the game wants to use if you start them first, so I start the game first and then other apps. Since I started doing that, I don't have anywhere near as much lag or FPS issues. So, you might want to take a look at what you have running before you start the game and start the game before starting other apps.
Hope this helps.
I do have pretty much about 1500 sims in one save all using some CC of some sort so yeah that is probably the case with this LOL.
I do have other programmes running as well, I play the game through Steam, thats running the background as well as the EA App, Discord to chat with friends etc and Chrome running Twitch so I can watch streams on the other monitor, so they could all be factors.
At least I know I'm not the only one experiencing it, I do enjoy the game alot and I like to populate my saves with alot of sims whether they are played households or not, I'm quite addicted to CAS and I love making different and unique sims alot.
I guess it's something I'll probably have to put up with because of this play style, I might do a new save game with minimal sims next time and see how that runs 🙂
Another option to try @andypuk1980a might be letting the game manage the relationship culling. There's a good chance that's what's limiting the Live-mode loading image loading, from your description of what you've done already. With 1500 Sims, you'll end up with a lot of Sims losing *all* relationships, though.
Discord is the one of the worst offenders that I found that affects the game if you use the app rather than the browser option. Try getting the game going before you start Discord and see if that makes a difference. The same holds true for any of the social media apps which keep a connection open to the internet. For some reason apps that keep an online connection seem to affect The Sims 4 much more than other games. Idk why, but it sure seems that way to me based on how my game performs.
And I play pretty much the way you do. Only about 500 played sims and I use CC too. I can see a significant difference in how the game performs when I start a new save. I like playing that way and just live with it. One thing I do that seems to help a lot with the lag is to turn autonomy off for my bigger households on big lots. Those are the ones where I see the most lag with autonomy on. You might want to consider doing that if you already haven't done it.
Hope this helps.
