White Screen Of Death

wasikm007​  The point of playing in windowed mode is to see whether it works, not that a computer can't handle fullscreen mode.  It's a diagnostic test—some problems only show up in fullscreen, so either way, we learn something.

I would suggest NOT letting the Nvidia app optimize your game settings, at least not all the time.  It's fine to allow it to choose your settings once, but I've seen problems result from having the option enabled all the time.  Besides, you might want to change the settings for one reason or another and wouldn't want them to keep reverting each time you load the game.

I can see your dxdiag now, and the two Sims 4 crashes are generic: the game crashed because it crashed because of an access violation.  There are some likely unrelated Windows update errors, and two recent crashes of the EA App, so I'd start by uninstalling and reinstalling the App.  This shouldn't touch your Sims 4 install unless you've installed the game into the App's folder (C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\EA Desktop).  When reinstalling, run the installer as an admin: right-click the download and select "Run as administrator."  Restart afterwards and before trying to play.

I'd still like to know whether windowed mode helps though.

As for the lag-related post, the general point is that the more items are on a lot, the more the game engine has to render, and the more work it has to do, the more likely the player will experience lag or other performance issues.  It's pretty straightforward.  What I found interesting is the explanation of what types of items are particularly heavy, for example I had no idea that pools/ponds/platforms contributed as much as they do.  Without getting too much into the weeds, I think the suggestion the post is trying to make is just "use content in moderation, and back off if you see these symptoms" rather than "we made all this stuff but you can't use it."  And more importantly, we can hope that this more rigorous description reflects the developers' goal to address it, eventually, in a way that's global and sustainable.  Bug fixes are all well and good, but the piecemeal approach can miss the forest for the trees.