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karoschmitz's avatar
karoschmitz
Seasoned Veteran
7 months ago

Camera movements very choppy since BH patch

Hi, I have a problem that started since the BH patch, that during Sims day time moving the camera, especially rotating it, or panning through the world becomes incredibly choppy, to a point that the game is not enjoyable anymore and even gives me motion sickness.

I had created a bug report 2 months ago, but it seems like noone is sharing this problem (as there are barely votes on it), so I'm starting to wonder if it is a technical issue I'm experiencing, otherwise I would think more people would have raised it by now.
I would really appreciate help 🙏

My computer is quite a strong gaming PC
- with a NVidia GeForce RTX 3080,
- a AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12 core processor
- 32 GB RAM
- running the game on dirextX 11
- a SSD hard drive with TBs free storage
- windows 11
I updated graphics drivers after experiencing these issues, to be sure it is not that, but no luck.

I play Sims 4 daily since many years, and have always had 60 - 170 fps, the higher range since direct X 11 started (at least from the second directX 11 patch on, as at first the performance went down and the second patch had fixed an issue with my type of graphic-card for directX11), and have been so happy to have such a fluent experience. 

But since the BH patch suddenly I'm having real troubles panning with the camera, or following a Sim, as it's so choppy. When it starts stuttering, my fps goes down to 40-60 fps, and the "Copy" section of my GPU Performance in Task Manager goes up a little, just above 0, while it's usually flat on 0. It doesn't stutter constantly but only when I move the camera for a few seconds, especially when rotating, after that it becomes fluent again, until i move the camera again and it again stutters.. it seems like it is loading something in the background when moving the camera around, and that brings down the fps to around 40-50 and stutters all camera movements. Once it stops stuttering it goes back to 120 fps and more. At in-game's night time it's better, then in the morning it starts to become worse and it's at its worst in community buildings or when I have a small business open with lots of customers.

I tested this without mods (which made no difference at all) and also once on a fresh save - The fresh save started off a lot less choppy and then became more and more stuttery over time. I haven't played too long with it though, as my gameplay is a rotational save with a full set of all lots built-up. At first I thought it's maybe the new world of BH, but even when i reverted to the first save where I got the pack without any custom builds in this world, just the premade ones, it still had the same amount of stuttering when panning around it. I also get this bad performance in old worlds now. I have a feeling it has to do more with the Sims than with the buildings, given the performance is great at night time - which is the time when there are barely any Sims walking outside.

Does anyone have any tips, how I could debug this, I would really love to play Sims 4 fluently again, the stuttering makes me feel motion sick?

lag

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  • karoschmitz's avatar
    karoschmitz
    Seasoned Veteran
    5 days ago

    Hey everyone, who did this GraphicsRules override to improve our camera performance:

    I just found out that removing Object LOD switching had directly an impact on an issue I experience since November, that some of my Retails are suddenly losing all their for-sale items: 

    [GTW] Retail: Shops lose selling functionality | EA Forums - 13072851 

    If you have a similar retail issue since adding your GraphicsRules override, you may want to look into the solution there, but it required to either remove our change to Object LOD switching, or to use memory boost. The first solution option comes with the downside of losing all that smooth camera performance, while the second option (memory boost) is still in early access and we don't know if that is safe to use yet long-term or not..

    Just wanted to leave a heads-up here after finding this out after a lot of days of testing. Hopefully you don't play much with retails and haven't run into this issue!!

    QUICK UPDATE:

    Just a small edit on this notice, after I did some more testing: I was not happy with the performance without Object LOD switching, and tried out if reducing the ObjectLODBias from 0.6666 (which is the original value, and 0.0 broke my retails) to 0.1, to not fully remove LOD switching but at least reduce it a lot, would work. And so far my retails were not breaking with this new value, even in the save that I was able to 100% reproduce the issue with. So that could be a good workaround if you have this issue but still want to keep acceptable camera performance. I will keep it on 0.1 for now (and I only use it in the not isLiveEdit condition, the isLiveEdit condition I kept on 0.6666) and play further to see if any more retails still start breaking.

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