Camera movements very choppy since BH patch

karoschmitz​  Thanks so much for the extra info.  I've forwarded your thread both for the overall performance improvement (and the original problem) and concerning the error we've been seeing in macOS.  I added TS4CommonRules to ConfigOverride and got around the error, and I separately tried deleting the include "Ts4CommonRules.sgr" line, which worked as well.

If you do narrow down the source of the issue to certain settings, I would love to hear about it.  One thing to note is that in theory at least, you shouldn't have to change both RenderSimLODDistances and RenderSimTextureSizes, just one or the other.  If all LOD values are the same (the latter), then it shouldn't matter at what distances the game switches between them (the former).  However, if the problem is the calculations required to perform the switch, you could see a hit when editing only the latter values.

I did patch just now, and GraphicsRules.sgr didn't change, so the edits you've made are not part of the performance improvements called out in the patch notes.

Oh thank you so much for sharing, that's great to know!! What a pity about the patch though, I was really hoping the team might have already fixed the issue by chance, given we rarely get performance updates hehe.

Awesome, I'll put the test on my list to try skipping the change of the RenderSimLODDistances to see if this would make a difference. I assumed those 4 distance values are telling the game what camera distance thresholds are making the Sim render with their LOD0-3 meshes, and that the SimTextureSize maybe just applies to the actual textures that are applied to the meshes. But I'm only making assumptions from the little bit of CC creation that I have learned, will definitely test one without the other!

Ah nice that the include work-around worked! If you delete the include line in GraphicsRules I would assume the error goes away, as it doesnt try to find this file anymore, but it will then be missing all the Common graphic rules that the GraphicsRules file is expecting. I could imagine that this might cause unexpected graphic outcomes. An include, at least in other programming languages, usually tells a program to load and process the contents of the file as if it were part of the current file, and the GraphicsRules might be expecting those values. The safer option is probably to keep the include line intact and copy the original Ts4CommonRules.sgr together with the GraphicsRules file into the override folder, to make sure all expected values are still provided to the game. Unless the override folder doesn't replace previously loaded resources but only adds to them, then it wouldn't really matter :)

I'll give the game another spin with a partial edit of the file! Yesterday I used my Mac to update to the latest patch (while keeping my PC waiting for mod updates this week) but the M1 laptop is so slow that it is hard to even measure the performance, as it already only reaches 35-50 fps without even having Sims spawn into neighbourhoods yet. The whole experience there is stuttery all the time, hard to distinguish if it got any better with the patch.. That's why I bought the PC in the first place and loved the fluent movements and high fps there, and got incredibly sad when the camera on my PC started stuttering so much suddenly after the BH patch update.

puzzlezaddict​ I just did a second round of testing with partial versions of the edits I mentioned before:

1. GraphicsRules only with the changes in ObjectQuality / ObjectLODBias (no changes in SimQuality) => This has made a smaller camera movement improvement, it was still stuttering quite a bit when Sims were spawning or when i moved over them back and forth
2. GraphicsRules only with the changes in SimQuality (no changes in ObjectQuality / ObjectLODBias) => This has made the biggest  camera movement improvement, it was only stuttering a little bit, especially when i rotate the camera in a new direction, but mostly performed well
3. GraphicsRules only with the changes in SimQuality (no changes in ObjectQuality / ObjectLODBias) and this time I removed the changes in RenderSimLODDistances and added back what they were before, and only set RenderSimTextureSizes to "2048, 2048, 2048, 2048" => This was as bad performant as without any changes to the GraphicsRules, it stuttered the most and continuously.
4. When adding both, SimQuality + ObjectQuality / ObjectLODBias changes, I felt like the game was most fluent, and only stuttered very very rarely, when some ui changed or when i moved around a lot after longer time.

The LOD switching really seems to have an issue in performance impact, definitely in a way that I did not experience before the BH patch. 

karoschmitz​  That is very helpful, and 3 is especially illuminating, since it pretty much confirms that the problem is the game recalculating the LOD to use and I suppose reapplying it.  I'll pass this along too.

I didn't test the game itself with the include line deleted, past confirming that I could load a save with no apparent problems.  It was more of a throwaway experiment for me.  But looking at TS4CommonRules, most of what's in the file looks like it should be in GraphicsRules or Options.ini, and maybe used to be or even still is, although I didin't go through and check every entry.  There are a couple of lines I didn't recognize near the top, so perhaps those are significant and the CPU and texture memory ratings are just for reference within the file itself.

The game is supposed to use all of the relevant files in Bin (also GraphicsCards.sgr and Default.ini) unless a specific file exists in ConfigOverride.  So I don't think that the game is would disregard the Bin version of TS4CommonRules, or not use it in certain contexts, just because it wasn't in ConfigOverride and the include line were deleted in GraphicsRules.  But I'd have to find something specific to test, and it's not as relevant since it's easy enough to drop a copy of TS4CommonRules in ConfigOverride.

Maybe the frameratelimit would be a good candidate: there's also a setting in Options.ini, so it would be easy to see whether the value in TS4CommonRules is being respected, e.g. change Options.ini to 60 and TS4CommonRules to 30 and see what happens.  I'm not asking you to test, just throwing it out there.

Anyway, this is great information and something I'll keep in mind for other users with the same issue.  I'm surprised there aren't more complaints, but perhaps a lot of players are used to sub-par performance and perhaps play on smaller lots and/or zoomed in to avoid the worst of it.  But it's great to know that the game can be smoother with a little work.  Even better would be for the game to have more optimized settings, but who knows when or if that will come.

Hello karoschmitz​ I experienced the exact same issues that you are describing: my camera was stuttering like crazy and I dropped frames down to the low 30 when I panned the camera around in the world. 

I came across this thread after searching in google what could be the issue. I also have a similar PC setup to you: RTX3080, i912900K, 64GBRAM, directX11 installed on NVME M.2.

Thank you so much, changing the graphicsrules.sgr settings to what you suggested in the pictures solved the issue, the difference is insane. Now my game is running at 100 FPS.

Whatever graphical changes that was done after the BH patch was devastating to computer setups like mine. I will go to your original thread and comment on that too.