Graphics Card not recognized The Sims 4
Ok so first off I' a little new to using The Sims forums for help, but my game has been crashing lately and giving an error screen reading "graphics card not recognized". I'm not sure what is going o...
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Hi Davina -
The system you are playing on is not using a discrete graphics card. That means that your graphics processing is being provided by a component that does other things.
If you go here - https://ark.intel.com/products/77774/Intel-Pentium-Processor-G3220T-3M-Cache-2_60-GHz - you will see your system's CPU specifications. A little bit in to that information, it indicates that the CPU is also the GPU, and that the memory in your system is shared between the CPU and your graphics. The maximum memory supported by your graphics is 1.7 GB. This cant be fixed by a driver update.
For low end games, web browsing, and things like running (most) Microsoft Office programs, this works great! For games and other applications that rely on the power of a dedicated graphics card, this will make for a very painful tradeoff which will result in reduced performance, graphics quality, or both. If you are really pushing the boundaries of what your system can do, expect overheating/shutdowns, choppy/slow playback, or crashing.
As noted, the only way to resolve this is by purchasing and installing a separate graphics card in your system. For desktop systems this isn't too hard, just make sure that your power supply will run it, and it's not too big to fit in your case. Alternately, it's possible to use an external graphics box to do this. For a laptop system, short of buying a new laptop, external graphics boxes are the only option, making your laptop/notebook not very portable.
Unfortunately the price of decent graphics cards right now is obscene.
EDIT: Whoops - I missed the model number indicating that this is indeed a laptop. Your HP Pavillion may have reached its limits as far as what it can do with The Sims 4. Another option is to turn down all the graphics settings in game. Turn off things like mirror/water reflections, high detailed textures, and distance, tree, or lot details. That may take some of the pressure off the system's limited resources.
Actually mine is an all in one desktop, if that makes a difference. Basically the problem is that my pc isn’t able to run my game efficiently anymore the way I’m used to playing. So I would either have to upgrade or get a new graphics card? Just want to make sure I followed that correctly.
No, update, as in get the latest driver for the graphics card you have now.
Another graphics card, if possible, would make the game run better.
A final reply in case Davina is still out there - Sorry its so late.
The all-in-one suffers from the same issue as a laptop. You cannot replace the graphics card which is built in to the unit. While those things (laptops all in ones) are convenient devices, they are not very up gradable, so gaming is limited on them. A game update can sometimes make a game less playable on the system where it worked fine before.
A new graphics driver, if one exists, is only going to hopefully correct any bugs in the previous driver. It cannot grant the system more graphics power, memory, or make a non-compliant card work.
If the system was working fine and then suddenly stopped, it is possible there is an issue with the unit, and if it's still under warranty you can have it looked at. There are a number of other possible software-related things not related to having a hardware problem, but without knowing the particulars, it's all guess work (Operating system patch, game patch, driver issue, etc...)
Hope you sort it out.
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