Sims 4 freezing my whole computer
So I recently switched over to a new computer, but after downloading the Sims 4 + the DLC that I own, the game has been causing my entire computer to freeze. Not the game itself, but the computer itself. I' not even able to force-quit the game or use the Ctrl + Alt + Delete trick to open up the task manager and force-quit. My computer eventually restarts on its own because it senses that it's frozen up and it does the whole "it looks like your PC crashed, we'll put together an error report for you" thing. When I opened the Sims 4 folder to see if there was a crash report, there wasn't any crash report file at all.
For reference, the computer I'm using is a Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X that's running on Windows 11. It has 16 GB of RAM with an AMD Ryzen 7 card, and a 6 GB AMD Radeon graphics card. The computer also has 1 TB of storage and there's still about 954 GB of free storage, so I know it couldn't be that the computer is being slowed down by the storage or anything.
The first time that the Sims 4 made my computer freeze, it was last night (4/21) at around 11:00 p.m. CST. I was able to click around the settings menu for a little bit from the start screen, but I was only able to set the graphics to laptop mode + check the "allow mods" box before the computer froze up. Today (4/22 at around 8:45 a.m. CST) I tried to start the game again to see if it would work this time, and I got a little farther than last night -- I was able to start a new game and even randomize through a few Sims, but then the computer froze up again while I was in CAS and customizing my Sim's face.
I did have some mods installed, but none that would have been too intensive on the game or computer itself -- the only ones I use are MC Command Center, UI Cheats Menu, Meaningful Stories, lotharihoe's Out of the Dark mod, Shimrod's Less Musical Chairs mod, the More Traits in CAS mod, and the Personality Please mod. The files that I have for the Personality Please are the main file that makes your Sims' personality match up more with their actual traits, plus the one for toddlers, cats and dogs, and the files that affect mean + romantic interactions as well as the file that makes it so that Sims gradually learn info about other Sims without you having to make them ask about the other Sim's hobbies/preferences/traits/etc.
I also have a lot of the DLC -- 19 Stuff Packs, all of the Game Packs that are currently out, 15 Expansion Packs, and 25 kits. I was able to run the Sims 4 on the old computer that I was using before, though, even with all of those DLC downloaded, and the old computer had way less RAM and less storage. However, that was back in August of last year, well before the Businesses and Hobbies EP was released or even announced.
UPDATE: I figured out that the issue with The Sims 4 crashing on my computer was because my computer was running on DirectX 12, which is apparently not backwards-compatible with games that usually run with DirectX 9 or DirectX 11. I didn't realize that was the issue until I was trying to troubleshoot the game and I ran another dxdiag after the game crashed a third time, and I noticed that the version of DirectX my computer used was different than what The Sims 4 usually runs on.
Once I looked up issues with The Sims 4 specifically related to the DirectX interface, I figured out that I could fix the problem by going into the Nvidia Geforce control panel and manually setting The Sims 4 to run with the "high-performance Nvidia processor" instead -- I've included a screenshot of the settings. If your computer runs on DirectX 12 but doesn't have an Nvidia graphics card that comes with the Nvidia Geforce Experience installed on the computer, I'm not sure what the process is for getting TS4 to run correctly.
Here's a step-by-step of what I did just in case anybody else has a similar issue:
- Open Nvidia Control Panel
- Go to "Manage 3D settings"
- Go to "Program settings"
- Click "Add"
- Navigate to "C:\Program Files\EA Games\The Sims 4\Game\Bin"
- Click on the executable file for The Sims 4 -- the one labeled as "TS4_x64".
- Under "Select the preferred graphics processor for this program," choose the option that says "high-performance Nvidia processor", and then click the "Apply" button in the bottom right corner of the control panel window. You do not have to do the same process with the "TS4_DX9_x64" or the "TS4_Launcher_x64" .exe files.
