Pixelated graphics after january 2025 update despite ultra settings

@s0ftcurrents  You've tried a lot, including most of the simpler interventions.  I do have a few more suggestions though:

Try playing in windowed mode, or fullscreen if you use windowed now

Try a lower in-game resolution, in both fullscreen and windowed, just to see what happens

Disable edge smoothing in-game, and play with the anti-aliasing settings in the Nvidia Control Panel (TS4_x64 for DX11, TS4_DX9_x64 for DX9)

If none of these help, try enabling DSR (dynamic super resolution) for the game, also in the Nvidia Control Panel.  The idea is to allow the GPU to render the game at a higher resolution, then scale down to fit the screen.  Try something around 1.78 first, which would be 2560x1600 in your case; 4.0 is twice the pixels in each direction and is probably excessive, although it wouldn't hurt to test it out.

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@puzzlezaddict wrote:

@s0ftcurrents  You've tried a lot, including most of the simpler interventions.  I do have a few more suggestions though:

Try playing in windowed mode, or fullscreen if you use windowed now

Try a lower in-game resolution, in both fullscreen and windowed, just to see what happens

Disable edge smoothing in-game, and play with the anti-aliasing settings in the Nvidia Control Panel (TS4_x64 for DX11, TS4_DX9_x64 for DX9)

If none of these help, try enabling DSR (dynamic super resolution) for the game, also in the Nvidia Control Panel.  The idea is to allow the GPU to render the game at a higher resolution, then scale down to fit the screen.  Try something around 1.78 first, which would be 2560x1600 in your case; 4.0 is twice the pixels in each direction and is probably excessive, although it wouldn't hurt to test it out.

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Thank you for the suggestions, I hadn't thought about that. Unfortunately even after playing around with the game settings in nvidia, the game resolution didn't change. 

As for DSR, it definitely enhanced the visuals on my laptop, but unfortunately not in the game. 

I so want to believe this issue is from EA's part, but it doesn't seem like anyone else is experiencing it.

@s0ftcurrents  Just checking, but once you enabled DSR for Sims 4, did you test at multiple in-game resolutions, in both fullscreen and windowed modes, with both DX9 and 11, and with Edge Smoothing disabled and using the anti-aliasing settings in the Control Panel?  I know it's a lot to test, but there really should be some combination that looks at least somewhat better.

I've seen one other comment about this recently, from someone who didn't get back to me after a couple of posts; their thread doesn't have anything useful in it, as far as I remember.  And I agree with you that there would probably be a lot more noise if everyone was affected.  So it's much more likely some combination of settings on your computer.

One thing you can try, if you want, is reverting to an older graphics driver.  You'd need to clean-uninstall your current version, as described here:

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

If you select your product details on this page:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/

you can find a number of older drivers that are still new enough to be perfectly functional, but older than your current one, which is the latest release.

As a random experiment, you might also try running the game on the Intel iGPU.  Performance would be significantly worse, obviously, but the question is whether the pixelation is present there.  That would at least tell you whether the problem was in the Nvidia pipeline.

@puzzlezaddict 

Yes, i tried different combinations along with the DSR, with both dx9 and dx11, but no luck. I considered downgrading my nvidia driver, but i'm hesitant. Before and after the update, i was using the same version, so i'm not sure that's what affected the game. I upgraded after the update, after i ran out of solutions. Do you still think i should give it a shot?

I tried running it on intel iGPU, as expected it was laggy, but in terms of pixelation, it was pretty much the same. Not sure what to make of it. 

Also this might be useless and just AI gibberish, but i let chatgpt scan the 'GPU Benchmark Results' and 'GPU Score Results' from my sims folder (attached). I'm gonna insert below the answer it gave me, id that tells you anything. Either way, thanks a lot for your help.

GPU Score Results:

This score data highlights a potential issue, particularly with the "PLAYER render target" scores being 0.000. This likely indicates that the game is not properly detecting or utilizing your GPU for rendering the player's game visuals, which would explain why you're experiencing low graphics quality.

Key Points:

• "Final Score: 0.901832":
  This score suggests that your system is technically capable of running Sims 4 at high to ultra quality. However, the issue lies in how the game is using the GPU.
• "Recomended Quality: Uber":
  The game is recommending Uber quality, which is the highest setting. This confirms that your system should be able to handle high-end graphics, but it's not being applied.
• PLAYER Render Target Scores: 0.000:
  These are concerning, as it indicates that the game isn't able to compute the geometry, memory bandwidth, or shader processing for the player's visuals, which points to a potential issue with GPU utilization or graphics API.

GPU Benchmark Results:

This performance report suggests a few important insights regarding your GPU's performance and rendering times:

Custom RenderTarget (Lower Resolution: 1280x720) vs. Player RenderTarget (Higher Resolution: 1920x1200)

• Custom RenderTarget (1280x720):
• Geometry, Memory Bandwidth, and Shader Processing times are relatively higher per frame compared to the Player RenderTarget.
• Geometry: 0.957 ms (average)
• Memory Bandwidth: 2.37 ms (average)
• Shader Processing: 1.49 ms (average)
• These times are indicative of the load being placed on your GPU to render at a lower resolution (720p) for the custom render target. The reported average values suggest that the GPU is handling geometry, memory, and shaders reasonably well, but the game is still utilizing a fair amount of time processing.
• Player RenderTarget (1920x1200):
• This is a higher resolution (1080p, or close), and the times here are much lower in comparison:
• Geometry: 0.463 ms (average)
• Memory Bandwidth: 1.40 ms (average)
• Shader Processing: 2.80 ms (average)
• The processing times for geometry and memory are much lower here, but shader processing time is slightly higher. This could indicate that the GPU is handling higher resolutions more efficiently in terms of geometry and memory.

@s0ftcurrents  Yeah, most of that is somewhere between nonsense and wild speculation.  For example, you know your Nvidia GPU is rendering the game (when you tell it to) because otherwise you'd see terrible performance.  Its load is clearly not zero.  It could be somewhat close to zero in certain circumstances, for example while you're in Manage Worlds, as that's a static screen.  But it does still take some resources to render.

At any rate, the one interesting thing is the Custom Render Target being listed as a lower resolution.  I'm wondering whether that's the problem, that the game is rendering everything at a lower resolution initially (for performance reasons) and then upscaling.  IF this is happening, and that's a big if, it would explain the worse quality.

What tool did you use to generate the benchmarks?  I'd like to compare my results on a couple of machines and see what I get.

And no, you don't need to install an older Nvidia driver if you don't want to.  Since the problem exists when using the iGPU as well, it's not limited to the Nvidia card or driver.

@puzzlezaddict

To be honest, i didn't intentionally generate the scores, the two files just showed up in my folder. The only thing i remember doing was performing a system diagnosis and a 'driver error' diagnosis from myAsus, but I doubt the two are connected. I don't really know of any tools, but if you recommended one, i could try to generate benchmarks and share them here.

I'm wondering though, if the game is in fact rendering at a lower resolution than the one i set, is there a way to resolve the issue? 

I'm also having the same issue. I've been trying to fix it for weeks no. Have you figured out what the problem was?