Is this a fine graphics card?
I was wondering if the Intel® Iris® Xe card can handle the sims 4 and all the packs at around medium to high setting?
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@mollythemaid Reshade will increase the demands the game places on your graphics chip, but I think you should still be able to get good performance. If you're noticing an impact while using Reshade, turn down the in-game settings a bit, or try a less demanding preset; from what I understand, there are plenty of options. There's no harm in experimenting a bit; I'm sure you'll be able to find settings that work for you.
Custom content in general should also be fine, but there are plenty of items that are much more demanding than EA-made content. Here again, if you're noticing a performance hit, you may want to look for cc items with a lower poly count. Most responsible cc creators will list the poly count on their download pages: the more polygons an item has, the more resources it takes to render. Here again, there's no harm in downloading something to see whether it works to your satisfaction.
Storing your custom content on an external drive will actually hurt loading times and won't help performance in any way. Your processor and graphics chip will be doing the same work to render the items, but the computer will be calling the data from what is probably a significantly slower drive than the internal one. So if your computer has the space internally, I'd store all game-related files there and use the external for other data, for example backup saves or collections of photos or music.
So if I wanted to play with more demanding cc what graphics card would I need?
@mollythemaid It's not really a question of needing a specific class of graphics cards for demanding cc. A lot of cc out there is no more demanding than base game items, or only a little more so, and you wouldn't have trouble with it. Some cc is so intricate that the game engine itself has trouble even if the graphics card can handle the load. In between, there's sort of a sliding scale. There's also a cumulative effect: using one high-poly cc item might be fine, but having eight sims on a lot where every outfit and a bunch of objects are all high-poly may drag performance down drastically.
That's why it's important to test out cc in-game before using it, and to add cc in smaller batches. (For example, create one new outfit and see how it works in-game, or redecorate part of the house but not the whole thing in one go.) This is true on any computer, and I would expect the Xe graphics in an i7 to be able to handle most if not all of what you'd want to do without any issues. All I'm saying is, it's best practice to test instead of assuming everything works.
In case you're wondering, the next-higher class of graphics processing is the type of card you'd find in an entry-level gaming laptop, for example an Nvidia 1650 or 3050. But then you'd be getting a gaming laptop, which you may not want.
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