The Sims 4 lagging on Gaming PC
Hello!
So recently I got myself a laptop to do school work on and I thought it could be fun to try how the sims runs on it (with all the expansions and such i have included) and honestly, it runs better than on my gaming PC. Now of course, I had the graphics way lower than what i's usually have them on, but even if I try to put the graphics to as low as possible on my PC there's still this really weird lag with the camera and moving around that just doesn't seem to happen to anyone else. I've also had laggy experiences on other games on origin like Apex Legends and The Sims 3 but any steam game runs fine.
Is there anything I could do or anything that could be causing this? I've tried re-installing the game and I've tried removing all my CC and even just tried running basegame but nothing seems to have a change in the performance. Now the lag isn't unbearable but there's this weird tearing and freezing that just randomly occurs, very annoying.
Thanks for any help!
@Faycasta Adding more memory probably would help, yes, especially if you like to run other tasks in the background while you play. Sims 4 should still run fine on systems with 8 GB RAM, but Windows and the game together can take up almost all of that these days. And while your system should use the page file to compensate, swapping files back and forth is going to be slower than having everything loaded into main memory.
The other issue is that Sims 4 does have occasional slowdowns regardless of how much memory a system has, or how powerful it is otherwise. It's possible that the RAM spikes correspond with times when the game would slow anyway, as it's loading a large amount of data (e.g. switching to Build/Buy, loading a lot with a lot of sims or a lot of stuff) all at once. The lags and other delays are getting more frequent, unfortunately, and there's probably not a lot anyone can do about it. That's not to say that more memory wouldn't help at all, just that it probably wouldn't be a cure.
RAM is cheap these days, so even if you're not sure it's going to help, it's a cheap experiment. Your motherboard supports 32 GB memory total, but 16 would probably be more than enough. Be sure to either get matching memory modules to what you have now (matched by product number, which you can see on the modules themselves), or find something with the same speed and timings that's also on the list of supported RAM for your board:
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/Z87-G45-GAMING#support-mem-0
Of course, if you're replacing your existing RAM, you don't need to worry about matching anything; just get something on the supported list.
If you want to do more testing before spending the money, try playing in a clean boot, with nothing else open in the background aside from Sims 4 and Origin. That should keep RAM use down as low as possible, and you might get a better idea of whether the lag would be less intrusive with more memory. It's not a perfect comparison, just another data point.
