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frosnese2's avatar
frosnese2
Seasoned Novice
30 days ago

Unrecognized Video Cared

Hi!

I recently reinstalled The Sims 4 on my laptop, but now I’m getting an 'Unrecognized Video Card' notification.

It’s very strange because I’ve been playing on this exact same laptop for months and never had this issue before. My graphics card is an NVIDIA RTX 4060 Laptop GPU.

My system is fully up-to-date; I even re-installed the latest Windows updates and ran DISM and SFC scans to check for corrupted files — everything came back fine. My graphics drivers are also the most recent version.

I found a forum post suggesting to disable a specific Win11 setting (Optimizations for windowed games), but unfortunately, that didn't help: Graphics card not recognized

I’m certain the game is using my RTX card, but I don’t understand why it’s suddenly not recognized. I know there are workarounds to manually add the card to the game files, but I’d like to understand why this became an issue now, especially since it worked perfectly for months.

Has anyone else experienced their graphics card suddenly becoming 'unrecognizable'? Does anyone know what might be causing this?

Thanks for any help!

graphics
launching
updates

1 Reply

  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    Hero+
    29 days ago

    frosnese2​  The "unrecognized video card" error happens when a GPU's device ID isn't in the game's database, so the game is assigning the default high-end graphics profile but warning that it might not be appropriate for your hardware.  I doubt your RTX 4060 is in the database or ever was.  But the error only shows up once per Options.ini, as in, that file stores the flag that you've already seen the message and the game doesn't show it again.

    Options.ini is in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4, so a new user folder would mean a new copy, and of course if you deleted Options.ini outright, that would also cause the error to show up again.

    However, if you're seeing the error every time you open the game, and you're not deleting Options.ini every time, that does indicate a problem.  Do other changes to your in-game options stick?  You could try switching from fullscreen to windowed mode, or vice versa, to find out—that would be an obvious detail to check.  If the game reverts, either something (usually an antivirus) is blocking changes to the file, or your copy is getting removed (e.g. by OneDrive) between play sessions.

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