Forum Discussion

Seasoned Novice

2 days ago

Solved

The Sims 4 Keeps Crashing Since Mandatory Memory Boost

I am absolutely certain that the repeated crashes I have experienced since the July 22 update are caused by the implementation of Memory Boost.

Before July 22, I had already tried manually enabling Memory Boost in the game settings. Whenever it was enabled, my game would crash in exactly this way. I therefore disabled it. At the time, it was only an optional feature, so I did not think much more about it.

After this update, however, Memory Boost became mandatory and can no longer be disabled. Since then, my game has been crashing constantly.

I asked Codex to help investigate the cause and have spent days performing troubleshooting and elimination tests, but the problem still has not been resolved. My computer is a high-end system, and every other game runs normally. Based on that, as well as the diagnostic tests documented in the attached report, I can largely rule out my hardware, operating system, and graphics driver as the primary cause.

I am not an EA engineer. I am just an ordinary player who wants to play the game. Over the past several days, I have spent a huge amount of my own time doing the work of isolating and documenting a game bug, and nobody is paying me to do this.

I genuinely hope that future updates can be properly tested before they are released, especially when an experimental feature that previously caused reproducible crashes for some players is made mandatory with no option to disable it.

Please restore an option to disable Memory Boost, or provide a hotfix for the DX11 crashes described in the attached diagnostic report.

EA-Support-English-Package.zip30 KB

crashing

steam

updates

LinMuzhi
2 days ago
I think my issue is most likely resolved. It has been running for over two hours without crashing. I honestly didn’t expect the CPU to be the cause, because I remembered updating the BIOS before. But after checking just now, I realized that the CPU microcode had not actually been updated to version 0x12F or later.So
Thank you very much for your patient help! I’ll keep monitoring it for a while longer.
So this is actually an issue with Intel’s 14th-generation i7 and i9 processors.After that, I played for another entire day without any crashes.

3 Replies

LinMuzhi
Seasoned Novice
2 days ago
I think my issue is most likely resolved. It has been running for over two hours without crashing. I honestly didn’t expect the CPU to be the cause, because I remembered updating the BIOS before. But after checking just now, I realized that the CPU microcode had not actually been updated to version 0x12F or later.So
Thank you very much for your patient help! I’ll keep monitoring it for a while longer.
So this is actually an issue with Intel’s 14th-generation i7 and i9 processors.After that, I played for another entire day without any crashes.
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
2 days ago
LinMuzhi Your dxdiag doesn't list any error reports. Are you deleting temp files or using some kind of cleaner app that would remove them? If so, please disable it for now—these reports may be relevant here.

What I can see from your English summary is that your computer has a processor that is known to have issues running Sims 4, and that was true even without Memory Boost. There are two particular errors that are associated with this problem. One is a Sims 4 crash, type c0000005 (access violation), with faulting module python37_x64.dll. While this error isn't totally specific to the issue with high-end Intel CPUs, it's seen there far more than in any other context. The other error is a bit more obscure.

So please look for relevant errors in the Reliability Monitor. Click Windows key-R and enter "perfmon /rel" without quotes, and you'll see a chart of errors and updates with a column for each day. Today is on the right.

Look for an error that happened at exactly the time of your most recent Sims 4 crash. If you find one, double-click it to see more details. If you don't see a new error, check back in an hour or so—the Reliability Monitor doesn't always update right away. You can also go back as far as you like.

If you do see a python37_x64.dll error, update your BIOS. If that doesn't help, boot into BIOS and disable CPU Turbo Boost, which would be somewhere under Advanced Settings. It might be called something slightly different, depending on your motherboard, but it'll have Turbo in the name.

If you see a different error or errors, please post them in a reply here.
Boldenbeau
Seasoned Adventurer
2 days ago
Just a curious observer who also has a high-end gaming system and am contemplating whether to update my game or not cause I am apprehensive about the permanent memory boost feature, have you looked at 'Microsoft event viewer' ? It logs crash events incl. for the sims 4 executable and might hint as the cause of the crashes - am just curious if those crash logs (specific event ids) in Microsoft event viewer are linked to memory boost.