Re: TS4 Stuttering

I have already tried V-Sync, so it sits at 60 FPS normally or over 120 without it. I've also tried to delete The Sims 4 folder in documents to reset everything and start a completely new game, but problem still happen.
The game stutters everywhere always. I don't have to do anything for it to stutter.

@DanSherwind  Your monitor is currently running at 75 Hz, so enabling vertical sync should give you 75 fps, not 60.  Try disabling the option within the game settings and using the one in the Nvidia Control Panel instead.  Right-click on your desktop, select the Control Panel, click Manage 3D settings > Program Settings, choose TS4_x64.exe (not TS4.exe, that's the 32-bit version), scroll down to Vertical sync, and set it to On.  It may help to enable Triple buffering as well.  Then click Apply, restart your computer, and test the game.

You can also try setting v-sync to Adaptive, although your graphics card is fast enough that that wouldn't normally be necessary.  It's still worth trying though.

In both cases, let me know what framerates you're seeing.

If that doesn't help, try playing in windowed fullscreen and windowed modes.  Since v-sync doesn't work in windowed mode, you can instead use the Control Panel to set a global Max Frame Rate, which should be 75:

If that doesn't work either, try playing in a clean boot:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-clean-boot-windows-10

When you've rebooted, open the Task Manager and go through the background processes list, shutting down any application that isn't critical.  As an example, the Nvidia processes are critical, but an application for improving game performance or coordinating your RGB lighting is not.

Already tried all that. Nothing changes.

@DanSherwind  Have you tried playing in a clean user folder yet?  Move the entire Sims 4 folder out of Documents\Electronic Arts and onto your desktop, and the game will create a new one the next time you open it.  Don't add anything to that folder; just test out a new save.

If that doesn't make a difference, try setting your monitor to run at 60 Hz, and repeat the above.  It may be that the monitor's settings don't work well with Sims 4.  To access the settings, right-click on the desktop, select Display settings > Advanced display settings > Display adapter properties > List all modes, and choose the 60 Hz mode with otherwise the same properties.  Restart your computer after changing the setting and before trying to play.

Did both of that and still same problem.

@DanSherwind  Could you post a video of what you're seeing, with the fps counter enabled?  I'd like to see exactly what's happening in your game.

If you'd like to experiment a bit, I'm not sure this person has exactly the same issue as you do, but they played with the default values in graphicsrules.sgr and got some interesting results:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-PC/CURRENT-ISSUE-Incredibly-Low-FPS-when-connected-to-Internet/m-p/10034152#M207335

Rather than edit the version in the game's program files though, you can make a copy, stick it in Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4\ConfigOverride, and mess with it however you want.  The game will read the copy in ConfigOverride as long as it's there, but if you start getting crashes or other weird graphics glitches, you can just delete that copy, no harm done.

That also didn't work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXpuuQ6qKlU

@DanSherwind  Your framerates are a little high whether your monitor is running at 60 of 75 Hz.  So either vertical sync is disabled or not working, or you're playing in windowed mode, in which case you'd need a different approach.  Either way, it can help somewhat to lock framerates to the refresh rate of your monitor.

What world are your sims in though?  Playing in an apartment in San Myshuno is known to have exactly the kind of stutter on 3x speed as is in your video, and the world runs even worse on lower-end hardware.  This is a flaw with the game, not anyone's computer, and there's no good fix for it other than not using 3x speed.

By the way, it wouldn't usually cause something like the stuttering you're seeing, but 10 GB free on your hard drive is not really enough for Windows to maneuver.  So it's worth trying to clear another 10 GB or so just in case it helps, and even if it doesn't affect Sims 4, it'll still be good for your system overall.

I did disable V-Sync, but even with it on, same problem.

As I said, I didn't have none of that stutter with my old G210, almost never. You can also see that it just stutters even without x3 speed.

I tried also other worlds like Willow Creek, but still same issues. Whether it is x1-x2-x3, it just stutters.

@DanSherwind  Honestly, I don't see anything odd in your video about how the game runs in normal speed.  The animations aren't perfectly smooth, but this is Sims 4.  I don't know what graphics settings you were using with your old card, but it's possible that lower graphics settings obscured any stuttering.  It's also possible that the issue is that the game is more complicated, and therefore doesn't run as smoothly, as when you were using the old card.

When you took the video, what app or apps did you have running that might impact game performance?  If you weren't using any kind of fps limiter, than your in-game framerates should have been higher—your GPU was barely utilized and certainly not close to thermal throttling.  So something else must have been holding down fps, and that something might also be interfering in other ways.

I honestly have no idea. I've also noticed my FPS were pretty low. I don't have anything open during gaming that might interfere. Also it does stutter quite a lot also in x1 speed.

@DanSherwind  The clean boot plus shutting down all nonessential apps might still help if you pair it with everything else you've tried.  Sometimes the strangest things can interfere with a game, for example an RGB program can lower performance by a significant amount for no apparent reason.  MSI Afterburner also prevented Sims 4 from loading at all for a few months.  So it's worth shutting down even a simple monitoring app just to see what happens.

If you don't get anywhere with that, you can try some more thorough hardware monitoring.  Download hwinfo from here:

https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

You don't need to install anything if you don't want to; just choose the Portable version, unzip it, and launch it from Downloads or wherever you want.  (If you would like to install, be sure to click the green button, not the orange one.)  Restart your computer, and don't open any other apps.  Launch hwinfo, choose "sensors only," and click the icon that's a sheet of paper with a + sign to start logging.  Save the file to your desktop for easy access later.

Wait five minutes, then launch Sims 4 and play for at least 20 minutes.  Click the same button to end logging.  Then upload the log to a third-party free filehosting site and link it here.  Please leave it in .csv format, or if you use OneDrive to share, please compress it in .zip format instead.

Turning off MSI and RivaTuner didn't help.

It crashed at the end, lol. My Sim went away for an audition.

HwInfo file: https://mega.nz/file/TUUhFaAZ#9xHFt4huh6YhSTVPnZfgzyLvTqMezqNYf9BvX5FhCMk

@DanSherwind  There's a lot here worth commenting about, so I apologize in advance for the wall of text that's about to come at you.

First, the simple part: I can see in the log where the crash happened, and it was accompanied by a large spike, more than 4 GB, in virtual memory usage.  Physical memory was steady until it dropped a few seconds later, as the game crashed.  Unless you had another program running, that's Sims 4 reaching for an unreasonable amount of virtual memory, for some unknown (to me) reason.  If you'd like to poke at this particular issue more, let me know.  This might just be the game in all its messy glory though.

More urgently, your Toshiba drive is at 22% remaining life, and hwinfo picked up a drive warning and eight reallocated sectors during the run.  (The log also contains a couple of values for that drive that should only increase as you're logging, but instead they reset to zero.  I mention this because it's odd and a sign that something is not working properly with the drive.)  This essentially means the drive is in danger of dying, although that could be months away.  But it could also happen soon, so now is a good time to back up any essential data on that drive, and you probably want to start shopping for a replacement.

You could run chkdsk on the drive, which will flag and reallocate bad sectors, in addition to giving you an overall count so you get a better idea of what you're dealing with.  However, at this stage, there's a small but nonzero chance that running the scan will cause further damage, so back up your essential data first.  If you do decide to run it:

• Hit Windows key-X and select Disk Management, and confirm the drive letter assigned to your 1 TB Toshiba drive, listed as F in your dxdiag
• Hit Windows key-X
• Choose either “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator),” whichever option is offered
• Inside the window that appears, copy and paste "chkdsk /f /r X:" without quotes, and enter, where X is the drive letter currently assigned
• When the scan is done, use this guide to find the results
• If you'd like me to take a look, attach the results to a post

To the main point, that your computer's Sims 4 performance is far below where it should be: there's no other obvious reason why this would happen.  Your processor and graphics card temperatures look fine, the power supply is fine, and I didn't see any other red flags.  While the stuttering may be partly due to the game itself, it's clear that the GPU is actually being underutilized to a significant extent.  It wasn't even running at its expected clock speed for most of the time you were playing.  Hwinfo picked up your framerates, which were all over the place but clearly not capped, which would account for the low readings, so there's some other reason your card isn't working harder.

From the drive activity, it looks like you have the game installed on the Toshiba drive, which could in theory account for the problem, at least indirectly.  However, I think the issue might be more about Sims 4 not being optimized for higher-end hardware.  This is not to say that it always runs like this on faster graphics cards, and in fact I think this is the exception.  But I've seen it happen before, and in the most recent case, running the game at a higher resolution increased the workload for the GPU to expected levels and made the game run somewhat better.

So if you're up for a bit of an experiment, there are a couple of settings to play with.  First, open the Nvidia Control Panel's Program Settings tab, and for TS4_x64.exe, set Power management mode to "Prefer maximum performance" if it's not already using that setting.  See how the game runs.  You don't need to run another hwinfo log—your in-game fps (leave it uncapped) will let you know whether this makes any difference.

If that doesn't help, again in the Control Panel, under Global Settings, set DSR - Factors to 2.00x, or as close to that number as is offered.  Then choose the highest in-game resolution available (it's with the other graphics settings).  Please try playing like this, again with fps uncapped, and use hwinfo to log the session.  This should at least clarify whether the low workload from Sims 4 is in fact contributing.  Rendering four times the pixels should max out your card or come close.

If you want, you can try the lower DSR settings as well; perhaps the game would run better with a factor of 1.2 or 1.5.  But I'd like to see what happens at 2x first.

So, I've tried everything and nothing changes.

I reinstalled the game on my other HDD and GPU utilization is still very low in the 30s.

I've tried DSR x4.00 and utilization only got up about 20-25%, so GPU was still at 50-60% at best.

@DanSherwind  Have you tried this in a clean boot, with zero nonessential apps running?  I realize you wouldn't be able to track GPU utilization or the other stats you're keeping an eye on, since you need an outside app for that, but it's still worth trying.  You can use the fps on cheat and use the in-game framerates as a stand-in for GPU use.

About the clean boot: I know of one RGB app that tanked someone's GPU utilization in another game and also didn't get disabled in a clean boot.  I'm not saying you specifically have this app or one exactly like it, but it's important to disable absolutely everything to be sure.