Sims 4 freezing and becoming unresponsive unresponsive during gameplay
Hello, I've been having issues with my sims crashing and becoming unresponsive for several weeks now, and it seems to be worsening. The game will load normally, sometimes it freezes just moments after I start a game, other times I will be able to play for a while then everything will suddenly freeze. There are also rare occasions where my computer will completely crash.
I've tried removing my mod folder, I've tried resetting all of the files, I'm sure what the issue could be. Any help would be greatly appreciate.
@ItsCozmic Sorry for the late reply. The issue looks fairly obvious from your dxdiag: one of your computer's graphics drivers is crashing over and over, probably while you're playing. Since there isn't a newer driver available for your Nvidia card, you'll need to do a clean uninstall and reinstall of the current driver. Download Display Driver Uninstaller from here:
Next, take your computer completely offline—disable wifi and/or pull the ethernet cord—and double-click the DDU.exe. Take note of where the file will land, and click Extract. If it's easier, you can copy the path and then paste it into the address bar in a File Explorer window. Open the folder and then launch Display Driver Uninstaller.exe, and you'll get a message that you're not in Safe Mode. Click OK, then go to Options and enable Safe Mode dialog. Here's a screenshot of what your options should look like; make sure the box in red is checked:
Close options, and the DDU, and then open the DDU.exe again. For launch options, choose "Safe Mode (Recommended)," and then click Reboot to Safe Mode (you'll need your password, so find it before rebooting). Once you login, you'll see this:
In the blue box, choose GPU, then Nvidia if it's not already showing. Then click Clean and Restart (red box).
Once your computer has rebooted, now back in normal mode, run the driver install .exe as an admin: right-click on the download and select "Run as administrator."
If you get an error that you can't install this particular driver, let me know. If it does install, restart your computer again, then try to play.
Please also look for new errors in the Reliability Monitor. Hit Windows key-R and enter "perfmon /rel" without quotes. You'll see a list of errors and updates, with a column for each day. (Today is all the way on the right.)
For any errors that mention Origin or Sims 4, or any that happened when you were playing, from after you reinstalled the graphics driver, click "View technical details," then copy the information and paste it into a reply here. Sometimes the Reliability Monitor doesn't update right away, so if you don't see any related errors, be sure to check back an hour or two. The timestamp on the initial chart can also be off by up to an hour, so that's not an entirely reliable metric, but the one within the technical details should be accurate.
@ItsCozmic That's the same error as in your first dxdiag, and what I was hoping the clean reinstall of the GPU driver would address. It's possible the issue is something else on your system and not the driver itself though. Please run a couple of basic checks on your Windows system files:
Hit Windows key-X
Choose either “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator),” whichever option is offered
Inside the window that appears, copy and paste “DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth” without quotes into the window, and enter
The system will start validating soon. If it throws an error, please list it here
After it reaches 100%, hit Windows key-X again
Again, choose “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator)”
Inside the window, copy and paste “sfc /scannow” without quotes into the window, and enter
