[SOLVED] Game is crashing seemingly randomly, screen turns off for a few seconds
Solution: It was a driver issue caused by AMD Smart Access Memory (SAM). This feature is AI-powered and seemed to give too much GPU memory to the system resulting in too little memory for Sims. To turn it off, I had to go into the BIOS and turn off two settings under Advanced > PCIe subsystem settings, then disable "Resizable BAR Support" and "4G Decoding" (names can differ).
I played one 2.5 hours session without any crashes after that.
Original issue:
Mods installed: Yes (issue happened without mods too, my mods are MCCC for save reminders and two own made CC items)
Game version: 1.120.117.1030 DX11
System: Windows 11, AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, AMD Radeon RX 7600, 16 GB RAM, latest Windows updates are installed, GPU drivers are up-to-date.
No crashes on Linux with the same savegame.
My Sims 4 recently started to crash seemingly randomly on Windows 11. Due to crashes in the past, I decided to reinstall Windows 11 a month ago, Sims 4 was finally running like a charm with the same savegame I've been playing with for months. This has stopped about two weeks ago.
The game now crashes randomly after playing 2 to 30 minutes, I barely reach one whole ingame day. When the game crashes, my two screens turn completely black for a couple of seconds. When they turn on again, I can see Discord reconnecting, I also lose connection to calls while playing. Other running apps don't seem to be affected. I usually have three apps actively running while playing, that'd be Discord, Vivaldi and Sims itself. Those crashes only happen when Sims is running, so I don't think another app is causing the trouble.
So I started analyizing the issue and here's what I got:
Windows Event Log: Whenever Sims is crashing, an info of type "Application Popup" is logged a second before which says "not sufficient virtual memory, the pagefile will be increased"
The pagefile's size is managed by Windows on the C: drive with 700 GB of free space. The issue persisted when changing the setting to "no pagefile" or "fixed size" of 1-16 GB.
Performance Monitor and Task Manager running while playing Sims: no shortage of memory or memory leaks of any app are visible, the memory is constantly at about ~13/15.2 GB without increasing over time.
Deleting cache files in the Sims directory didn't gave me any luck.
The lastCrash.log file contains a memdump of around 48 KB which I can't decrypt. I'll attach it here.
Hopefully someone can help me as it is really frustrating to lose progress over and over. 🙏
