Re: Recommended requirements for Sims 4 and all packs?
@waterywatermelon A laptop or desktop Nvidia GTX 1650 can run all Sims 4 packs together on ultra settings, with some room to spare. A 1050 ti can as well, although the laptop version is cutting it a bit close; the faster cards in previous generations can also be fine. Any 5000- or 6000-series AMD card is more than fast enough, with the possible exception of the 5300M, as are the 570, 580, and similar older cards.
I could go into the other recommended specs, but it's easier to talk about specific hardware rather than describe all the details related to each component. If you want to know about your current system or a new one you're considering buying, please list the specs or link a product page.
The issue is that Sims 4 itself lags for reasons that are unrelated to the speed of the graphics card. Of course the processor might not be able to keep up, but even without hardware issues, the game can have slowdowns for various reasons, or no apparent reason at all. If you look at a hardware monitoring report, you can see that a CPU and GPU might not be close to maxed out, yet fps is dropping or sims are standing around doing nothing. This is the game engine's fault, perhaps (but definitely not always) exacerbated by mods.
There's no reason you can't play with most of your packs at once. All game and stuff packs should be fine—a couple of game packs add a little bit to the demands of Sims 4, and SPs barely have any impact at all—as should the early expansions. Cats & Dogs is the first demanding one, but I don't think the newer ones are all equally problematic. For some, it's situational, for example Eco Lifestyle can cause lag when the NAP votes come in, and you might find that performance drops when the eco footprint is green. But you can disable certain features without removing the entire pack.
As for how to uninstall a pack, it's certainly possible, but the only supported way is to uninstall the entire game and reinstall without that pack. Or you could manually delete the pack folders. Either way though, Origin will still try to reinstall any missing packs, sometimes even if you have auto game updates disabled. So the easier method is to disable those packs in Origin:
https://sims4.crinrict.com/eng/2017/03/disable-single-packs/
Snowy Escape is one of a few new packs that appears separately in the Control Panel, for reasons I personally haven't heard. Origin would probably try to reinstall it at some point as well.