@melissa369148 Your screenshots look reasonably normal to me, although it's difficult to tell from the photos. Please instead put the game into windowed mode and use Windows key-shift-S to take screenshots. Look at some in-game screenshots as well (taken with C) to see whether the problem shows up in both places, only one, or neither.
Your laptop's hardware is sufficient to run Sims 4 on ultra graphics settings, and I don't think the hardware is the issue anyway. The only errors in your dxdiag are from Remind_SSD.exe , a component of MSI Dragon Center that you really don't need to have running, but it's unlikely that these crashes have any effect on Sims 4. Still, you could delete or rename the file if you want; a cursory Google search says doing so won't have any obvious negative effects. Dragon Center is bloatware-adjacent overall anyway.
Thank you so much for taking the time to help. Maybe I'm expecting too much - i just feel they seem blurry compared to sims you see on youtubers LP (granted i know they have better set ups but I still feel mine are blurry!)
Although the quality does seem better in the screenshots
Attaching some screenshots taking using windows key and a recording - there appears to be some lag also. I only have 10-15 CC hair styles and the usual MCC centre and UI cheats.
Having difficulty uploading here but I have added to my google photos including the screen recording : https://photos.app.goo.gl/bcA7xvkAij92regn7
@melissa369148 Your screenshots don't look that bad to me, but it's possible that they could look better, whether they used to or not. First of all, do you use GeForce Experience, and have you enabled the option to "optimize" your in-game graphics settings? If so, please disable that and test again.
If that's not the issue, did you ever mess with the Nvidia Control Panel settings, whether for Sims 4 or overall? I've seen a handful of complaints about antialiasing not working as it used to, but it's also true that the game's executable changed after the last patch (1.107). So if you did apply some settings to TS4_x64.exe, you'd need to reapply them to TS4_DX9_x64.exe for the DirectX 9 version of the game. (TS4_x64 now corresponds to the DX11 version.)
Additionally, you could play with the antialiasing settings just for fun and to see whether you can get an improvement. As long as you're choosing the "override application setting" option, the others should apply. If you go this route, test with the in-game Edge Smoothing option both enabled and disabled.
I will also say that some YouTubers likely play at higher resolutions, which would make their games look sharper than you'd see on a 1080p screen. So this may not be a valid comparison at all, depending on how the videos were recorded.
For the lag, there are so many possible causes, I couldn't list them all. But it's probably not related to the graphics, given how Sims 4 works overall and that there's no sign of the kind of serious graphical issue that would cause lag all by itself. If the lag you see is intermittent and not a huge problem, I'd chalk it up to how the game works. If it's interfering with your enjoyment of Sims 4 overall, I'd be happy to try to troubleshoot it with you. Let me know.
