FPS Drop - Settings normalizes FPS

@escalusia  Your dxdiag shows a number of errors related to the Nvidia graphics driver, so the place to start is by doing a clean uninstall and reinstall of the driver.  Here's how:

https://crinrict.com/blog/2019/02/clean-re-install-of-graphics-drivers-with-display-driver-uninstaller-ddu.html

You can get a fresh copy of the newest Nvidia driver here:

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/187304/en-us

Restart after installing the driver and before trying to play.  You'll also need to redo all your Control Panel settings, but it's worth testing once without changing anything just so you know how the game behaves on default settings, both in the Control Panel and in-game.  I'd also try disabling post processing in-game: I've seen it produce smaller fps drops for no apparent reason.

You can also undo the RAM overclocking to test, if you want.  Basic memory overclocking is just enabling XMP in BIOS, which you can do or undo with one click, so it's easy to switch back and forth.  (There's literally a button that says XMP.)  Just boot into BIOS and disable it, see what happens, and then reenable it if you don't get any results.

If your brother went further than that, you can probably export his settings, since Asus boards tend to have a way to do this, and then restore to defaults.  But in that case, you should check your motherboard's manual and probably consult your brother too before doing anything.

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@roberta591 wrote:

@escalusia Have you tried running the game with only one monitor? It looks like each monitor is using up to 8k Mb of shared (main) memory.  8K Mb + 8k Mb = 16K Mb of memory. You only have 16k Mb of main memory.  When the main memory gets swamped virtual memory (page file) is used which is space on your main storage device (ssd) and that is slower (main) then shared memory.

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@roberta591  This is completely false.  Monitors don't use VRAM or main memory, the computer does.  The memory numbers listed in Display Devices are for the graphics card, and they reflect what the GPU can use, not what it's currenly using or has reserved.  Also, there isn't two times anything here: the data is listed twice because there are two monitors, but there's only one set of data and one device (the graphics card) that could potentially borrow 8 GB from main memory.

Additionally, the GPU won't borrow from main memory until it's exhausted its own VRAM, and Sims 4 won't come close to using 6 GB of VRAM at 1080p even on ultra settings.

There is no evidence that main memory is full or close to it while this person is playing.  Even if it is, Windows should prioritize keeping Sims 4 data in physical RAM and instead swap out other processes that are less demanding or haven't been accessed recently.  That's part of the OS's job.