Whenever I try to tab out look at Google, or discord, or anything really it just won't let me. Instead the sims 4 window stays on screen. It doesn't matter if the game is frozen or glitching or what, the game can be working just fine and it still does it. I don't want to buy a second monitor just to play a game I bought with my own money, because yes, I got sims 4 when it still cost money.
The problem is DirectX11. The sims used to be on DX9 but recent patches switched the game to DX11 which doesn't allow alt+tab in full screen mode. If you switch to windowed mode, you can alt tab again.
On my laptop new windows open on top of the sims but the sims itself no longer minimizes which is very annoying. It is a serious downside of running on DX11.
You can choose to stay on DX9. There is a box to tick in the game settings. I did that and TAB works fine.
You probably checked the settings, but first thing I thought of is the various window modes. Not sure if there are 2 versions or more. If the problem is new and you did no changes, this is probably not the reason. I play in full window mode (I think), and I believe this is the only mode where TAB will work. If you added CC recently, that might be the cause, although I guess you would have known if you added something to alter the window/UI etc. However, once my sim could not travel by phone because of a cc bed (!), so thee is not always a clear relevance.
I'm on Win11 and if I tab/start I can see the task bar where I click on a desktop icon that allows me to open another desktop.
If I think before I play then I have that 2nd desktop ready to go. š
This happened to me recently but I managed to solve it. Turns out I played the game in fullscreen mode. If you go into the game options and then under graphics there's an option that lets you set a display type. Mine was on fullscreen which is why it didn't work but when I switched to Windowed Fullscreen I could tab out of the game again. Hope this help and if it doesn't, mabey try asking chat gpt for help and describe your specific situation!
