Game becomes laggy in the middle of gameplay

@puzzlezaddict  going to see if I can do this today, first I'll back up all of sims4 and sims2. One strange thing is, I cannot locate the original game folder of Sims. edit: found it! the search function in windows just isn't doing a great job. 🙂

Did uninstalling and reinstalling Origin usually solve a lag problem, as far as you know? If Origin was the issue, wouldn't the game lag from the start? Also, is having 1 save file a problem that could cause this?

I'm hesitant to disable Backyard Stuff, I already have several families using items from this pack. Maybe it would do more harm than good.

This morning I tried to start the game and it was laggy from the start. Even clicking any menu didn't help. I rebooted my whole pc and started the game newly, then it was OK. Could it be a hardware thing in the end, or memory shortage or something?

@IrisuChan  This could be a lot of things, including Origin trying to do... something... at some point while you're playing and then crashing.  The Origin errors in your dxdiag are real, and even if it's impossible to tell from that info whether they directly affected your game, it's at least an identifiable problem.

Beyond that, troubleshooting is about gathering info and guessing.  For example, I would guess that if the issue were low memory, you wouldn't be able to resolve it while playing.  But it's easy enough to check RAM use while you play—bring up the Task Manager and have a look—or to do some more general hardware monitoring that includes tracking RAM use.  The reason I didn't start there, by the way, is that with other people who've reported this issue, the hardware monitoring has mostly not shown anything interesting.  That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, just that it's going to be lower on my personal list of suggestions than addressing an issue I can see in your dxdiag.

As for only having one save file, that wouldn't be a problem in and of itself.  However, if we don't know whether the game lags in a separate save (in a clean user folder, as described), we can't be sure that the issue is the game or your system instead of that particular save.

Point is, I'd personally go in this order: reinstall Origin to fix error -> new save in clean user folder -> hardware monitoring.  But you can absolutely reverse the first two steps if it's easier.  Hardware monitoring should be after the others though: it should happen in a clean folder anyway, and a glitchy Origin might add unnecessary noise to the data.

@puzzlezaddictI backupped my origin games and docs&settings folders for sims, so I will try the clean uninstall and reinstall of Origin. The steps seem clear so I think I can do it. However, how can I make a clean save? (Related to what you wrote previously- new save in clean user folder) Are there steps to follow for this as well?

If my game data in the origin game folders remain, then how will I get my old save in the game with my families? Or will the game create a NEW save file, that has all my data? I would like to know this before I proceed with all. I want to play again soon haha. (not totally addicted, or anything...)

@IrisuChan  The clean user folder is the new Sims 4 folder in Documents\Electronic Arts that I described.  If you move the existing folder to your desktop (or elsewhere), the game won't be able to read it and will instead create a new folder with no content.  If you start a new save in this clean folder, there will be zero influence from any of your existing mods, cache files, or any other user data—this is a way to test all of that at once.

To clarify, this is a completely separate folder from the game's installed files, as in, what Origin installs in Program Files (x86) or wherever you choose.  There is no user data within the game's installed files or within Origin's installed files.

The contents of the Sims 4 user folder are interchangeable, and the folders themselves can be swapped back and forth.  So if and when your game is running smoothly again, you can simply copy your existing saves to the new folder from the old one.  But before doing that, it's best to try a new save so you have a baseline for performance.  If you still see lag, the issue is clearly not user data, and we can move onto system issues.

@IrisuChan  This is not a bug.  It's a performance issue on a few systems that dates back at least a year; I can dig out the ~20-page thread that I believe was started last June if you're curious.  The reasons it isn't a bug are that it doesn't affect most players and that it sometimes responds to changes at the system level.  For example, one player fixed it by disabling Razer software, another by disabling the Freesync features on their monitor, and I believe one temporarily fixed it by installing a different graphics card only to have it resurface six months later.

That's not to say that Sims 4 is perfect and contributes nothing to the problem, just that it's not a fundamental flaw in the game software.  There are many issues that only surface with certain combinations of hardware and software, and it wouldn't be possible for the dev team to to ensure perfect compatibility with all possible system configurations.

You can of course post in the bug forum if you want, but given that this is clearly a system issue, the thread would probably be moved back here.