Re: Base game The Sims 4 Steam edition keeps crashing

@djf149  This crash lists a component of the Nvidia graphics driver (nvwgf2umx.dll) as the faulting module, but DDU should have taken care of any driver-related issues.  Have you overclocked your GPU, either manually or with the tool built into GeForce Experience?  If so, please revert to stock settings and test again.  If that doesn't help, and you've overclocked your CPU, revert that as well.

If that doesn't help or isn't relevant, do you have another graphics card you could test with?  I'm not saying your RTX 4090 is defective, only that it's worth testing.  You would need to DDU the Nvidia driver if you were installing an AMD GPU but not another Nvidia card.

If you don't have anything else to test with, you could remove the Nvidia GPU entirely and plug your monitors into the motherboard.  The Intel iGPU would take over, meaning performance would be significantly worse, but it would still be a good test.  Your computer already has the Intel graphics driver installed.

And I realize this might sound extreme when only one game is crashing, but the errors I've seen have been very clear.  And if it were purely a defect with Sims 4, we'd see a much larger number of posts about it.

I'm not using any known overclocks, I'll have to see if nvida new driver app is implementing a soft OC on its own. Geforce experience for nvida GPUs no longer exists as this new nvida app replaces it.

I'll unseat the 4090 and plug in a monitor to the Motherboard instead and do a quick session test. I also have a separate GPU available as well in my Wifes build I could do a quick swap to if needed to do another basic test.

I've been checking my CPU OC as I know my Motherboard has it's own built in OC parameters that does it own auto OC. 

It's a pro z790-a WIFI. I don't know much or understand CPU OC, so I usually just go with the auto setting but for this current motherboard I would not know where to look to disable that.

I know the 13th and 14th gen intel chips have been having their own issues. From what I understand in other games, crashes that blame the GPU memory are actually in relation to the CPU instead. Have you seen this be true within the Sims as well with crashes in relation to GPU or it's drivers?.

I had a faulty 13th 13900k be RMA around September and be replaced with a 14900k instead. During this transition I updated the bios to a bios release from 2024-09-05 which included the CPU Microcode 0x129. I did not keep up with the intel stuff since that update and RMA and noticed intel released another microcode fix that was supposed to be the "Final" fix for all these issues. This is what I updated to and referenced in my early reply when I said bios had been updated. I wonder during this period if the new RMA intel chip damaged itself as the bios I was on did not actually fully resolved the problem during that time.

I don't play a wide variety of games, the last 5 months for me has been purely New World and escape from tarkov and with this new RMA chip. I noticed some crashing issues every now and then with New World, and recently I've gotten frequent blue screens with escape from tarkov that I had wrapped up to just being a bad performance update in relation to that game. Now this issue with Sims has me second guessing if this is truly an issue  the CPU itself rather then the Games I've happened to play these past few months.

@djf149  The first error is another issue with the graphics driver; the second (the BlueScreen) is something about referencing invalid system memory.  I can take a look at the crash dump from this BSOD, if you want.  It would be in C:\Windows\Minidump, and you'd need to copy and paste it to your desktop, then upload it to a third-party filesharing site and link it here.

The Sims 4 crashes related to motherboard-overclocked CPUs generally list python37_x64.dll, which I didn't see in the Windows Error Reports in any of your dxdiags.  I also haven't seen any CPU overclocking errors that resulted in a crash of the Nvidia graphics driver.  That doesn't mean that you absolutely don't have this issue, only that it would be, from my perspective at least, a unique presentation.

If you want to test anyway, and it wouldn't hurt, the setting you're looking for is CPU Turbo Boost, and it would be buried somewhere in the Advanced BIOS settings.  Exactly where depends on the motherboard.  While you're there, it might be helpful to disable XMP as well.  Your most recent BSOD doesn't have to be RAM-related, but it's always a possibility, and RAM errors can look like just about anything else.

If you do have some time to test with both your system and your wife's, I would suggest swapping one component at a time, at least the compatible ones, to see whether you can isolate the problem.  I'm not totally convinced this is a hardware issue either, but at this point, you've done a lot of troubleshooting on the software side.  The GPU is still the place to start.

As far as a damaged CPU goes, it's possible but unlikely, as far as I've seen or read.  There was an issue with Asus boards and AMD chips around two years ago, but I hadn't heard that Intel chips were routinely being fried, just overclocked past the point of stability, leading to crashes.  And while I'm not convinced that the BIOS update that was supposed to fix the problem actually worked for everyone, I also haven't had more than one or two people, out of at least two dozen, say that nothing worked to fix that exact type of crashing.

Anyway, let me know what you find, and we can go from there.