I've been having massive frame rate crashes in the sims 4 for a few months now. It starts up on a smooth 60, and alters between the usual 30-60 then all of a sudden it will drop to 10-15, sometimes below 10, and won't return to 60 until I restart the game. Then it likely will crash like this again after a few minutes. Sometimes I can get a play session in and this doesn't happen, but this is very rare. Is this the game? Is this my GPU? I have no mods and have repaired the game. It's a newer save file. I've also tried it on a fresh new save game and the problem does occur eventually there too. I've reinstalled origin and the sims 4, made no difference. In game settings make no difference.
I have a gaming laptop, bought in 2017. It's been running the sims 4 for years without problem. I have all the DLC, could this be an issue? The save file is saved on my C drive but there is at least 20 GB free so that should be enough for the ongoing save files while playing? Even with every DLC? I've tried every solution I can find and nothing has fixed it. PC specs meet recommended for sims 4 easily. Playing offline (even off WiFi completely) makes no difference. My lot is not complicated that I'm playing on and a relatively small household size though this makes no difference either as I have tested.
It's a very frustrating problem because I don't know if it's the game or my pc and I don't want to go ahead and buy anything new (GPU, PC) if it's just the game. Thank you.
@MissPlumbob123 Are you doing anything in-game when you see the fps drop, for example entering Build/Buy or traveling, or does something happen in-game (e.g. the weather changes, sims show up on the lot, etc.)?
As an experiment, please try playing a new save in a clean folder. Move your entire Sims 4 folder out of Documents\Electronic Arts and onto your desktop, and when you launch the game, a clean folder will spawn with no content. Don't add anything to this folder yet; just see whether you get another fps drop. Let me know either way.
It would also be helpful to see a dxdiag on your computer.
Hi. No I'm not doing anything in particular, it happens seemingly randomly. I can just be doing nothing (letting the game run off pause) and it can happen. I made a new save and it lasted a day and then this evening (maybe about 10 hours into the save file altogether) it finally happened again ☹️
@MissPlumbob123 There aren't any errors in your dxdiag that would explain the issue, although you do have a number of failed Windows updates. Just for housekeeping, it would be good to run a couple of basic checks on your Windows system files. Here's how:
Hit Windows key-X
Choose either “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator),” whichever option is offered
Inside the window that appears, copy and paste “DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth” without quotes into the window, and enter
The system will start validating soon. If it throws an error, please list it here
After it reaches 100%, hit Windows key-X again
Again, choose “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator)”
Inside the window, copy and paste “sfc /scannow” without quotes into the window, and enter
Post the message you receive here
Restart your computer, hit Windows key-i, select Update & Security, and click the button to check for updates
I think that it would be helpful to see how your hardware is performing while you play. Please download hwinfo from here:
You don't need to install anything if you don't want to; just choose the Portable version, unzip it, and launch it from Downloads or wherever you want. (If you would like to install, be sure to click the green button, not the orange one.) Restart your computer, and don't open any other apps. Launch hwinfo, choose "sensors only," and click the icon that's a sheet of paper with a + sign to start logging. Save the file to your desktop for easy access later. Please also make note of the time when you start logging.
Wait five minutes, then launch Sims 4 and play until you notice the fps drop; check the time here as well. Let the game run at least five more minutes after that, then you can quit. Click the same button to end logging. Then upload the log to a third-party free filehosting site and link it here. Please leave it in .csv format, or if you use OneDrive to share, please compress it in .zip format instead.
Please also let me know how long it took for your fps to drop, starting from the time you set hwinfo to log. I'll probably be able to see when the fps drop happens in the log, but I'd like to know I'm looking at the time when that happened and not something else.
@MissPlumbob123 First, the easy part. The icon next to the Windows 10 2004 info means that Windows thinks your computer isn't ready to be updated to 2004, most likely because it's missing a driver that would be necessary with version 2004. This isn't a critical issue at this point, although if you want to troubleshoot it, let me know, and I'll go poking around a bit.
The hwinfo log actually ran for almost 22 minutes, so perhaps it was minimized rather than closed completely after you quit Sims 4. Point is, it contains the relevant information.
The most obvious issue is that your processor is running very hot, or rather two cores are, while the others are merely somewhat hot. The temperatures for cores 0 and 1 both look like this:
Core 1 got even higher (93° C). In either case, the temps aren't high enough to cause any immediate damage to your CPU or your laptop overall, but they're definitely high enough to cause significant thermal throttling. The CPU fan does appear to be running properly in terms of overall speed, but it could be clogged with dust, as could the vents. So a good place to start would be cleaning out the inside of the laptop.
The immediate cause of the actual fps drop is likely the fact that the dedicated card downclocks, and (I think) is no longer being used by the game:
I say "I think" because hwinfo doesn't have a reading for GPU load, although it's likely close to zero. It's normal for a laptop's dedicated card to downclock when it's not being used, for example if you tab out to a browser or even perhaps if you open the options menu in Sims 4. But it should start working again as soon as the graphics load calls for it. The above chart shows that's not happening, the game is almost certainly defaulting to the much slower iGPU, and the result is the kind of framerates you'd expect when playing on an Intel HD 530 rather than your dedicated card.
The real question is why. It could be that the GPU is overheating, but the temperature reading is also absent from the log. It could be an issue with the GPU driver, but there weren't any errors in your dxdiag to suggest that. You can still look for an error from this game session though. Hit Windows key-R, enter "perfmon /rel" without quotes, and you'll see a chart listing errors and updates, with a column for each day. (Today is on the far right.)
The Reliability Monitor can take an hour or two to update, so if you don't see anything right now, check back in a bit, or in the morning. The timestamp in the initial chart can also be be inaccurate, but the one in the technical details should be correct. If you do see an error from when you were running hwinfo, please click "View technical details," copy the information, and either paste it into a reply or attach it to a post.
Please also restart your computer, open hwinfo again, and see how many readings there are for your GPU. The section is towards the bottom of the list, at least it is for me, and under normal circumstances it would show a dozen readings or more. Please let me know whether you see ones for GPU temperature, GPU core load, GPU memory clock, and GPU memory usage, or anything that looks similar. It's possible that your card doesn't have those sensors, or that they're not being picked up, or that they're broken.
Without more information though, I still think excessive temperature is at least a somewhat likely cause of the GPU not working properly, so cleaning the inside of the laptop is still the best place to start. If that doesn't help, feel free to run another log and upload it for me to see.
There are no errors in the reliability monitor for around that time of the log. I've checked the log again after a restart and yes I see all of those sensors listed under GPU. I can do another log scan later today and post it for you. Though first I can definitely disregard dust as I cleaned my laptop thoroughly the other day, as this was a first check for me as well as I guessed it might be the problem, but the inside actually didn't have much dust at all, a very light coat on the very bottom of the laptop casing, under the motherboard, and a very light dusting in the fan but far from anything I'd call a problem, but I still cleaned it anyway so that can't be the issue. I also checked it a year or so ago and the same dust levels were then, very low, so I don't believe it's ever been very dusty or clogged meaning that can't be the reason for the overheating. Do you think it could be the end of the GPUs life? To be honest I'd be relieved if it's my laptop that is the issue rather than the game, as this is something that can be fixed. I'll post again with a log with another Sims FPS crash in a few hours. Thanks 🙂
@MissPlumbob123 The cleaning you did made a small difference, but the pattern with the CPU temps was the same: cores 0 and 1 were a couple degrees cooler but still reached 90°; cores 2 and 3 were significantly cooler although still hot. This log did also have the relevant GPU info, and unsurprisingly, the graphics card is running hot as well:
While 80° C isn't immediately harmful to your graphics card, it's enough to induce significant thermal throttling. The interesting question is why the card doesn't recover once it cools down, as you'd expect. Even though the card's the temperature returns to a much more reasonable 70° or so, enough for only mild thermal throttling, the core load stays much lower, other than some brief spikes:
I can't say for certain that this is in fact the issue, at least not without your testing while keeping the laptop much cooler. You could try using a cooling pad or fan, or if you just want to get a good reading, open all the windows in a room on a cold night and see what happens. It's easy enough to alt-tab to hwinfo to see what your GPU's temp looks like at any given point; if you notice an fps crash, see whether the temperature just spiked over 80°.
I don't think your laptop is necessarily nearing the end of its life, at least not overall. It's possible the cooling paste on the GPU(and CPU) has dried out and could use another application, which is significantly cheaper than a new laptop. But of course it's worth finding out if lower temperatures keep this from happening in the first place before you spend any money on that kind of work.
I'd also be interested to know whether putting the game in windowed mode, alt-tabbing to something else, minimizing the game for a few minutes, and then bringing the window back up fixes this. That's the kind of process that might force the card to recover and work at its proper capacity again, but I don't know enough about how graphics cards and their drivers work on that level to do anything except speculate.
Thank you for all your help. I'm glad to know it's likely not the game at least. I'll leave it here and have some more digging myself. I've removed some of my older posts with my links in. Have a great day, thanks again 🙂 huge help.
I know this is a really old thread but I had this exact same problem and I fixed it a few minutes ago by turning off the XMP in the BIOS settings and now my game is butter smooth.
