Why is my game so slow?

aob

Lately my game has been super slow and I'm not sure why! What can I do to fix it? I am on a Macbook Air, if that helps.

Edit: I took out my mods folder and ran the game, and it is still slow

Tremayne4260

It could be due to the size of your saved game. The longer you play, the larger the save gets. As a test, have you tried starting a new game to see if that runs faster?

aob

Tremayne4260 wrote: »

It could be due to the size of your saved game. The longer you play, the larger the save gets. As a test, have you tried starting a new game to see if that runs faster?

I only have one saved game.

Nearia35

Also, the fact that it's a Macbook Air. They're not gaming machines by any stretch of the imagination. The entire system is running on less than half of the power of today's standard desktop-class graphics cards. macOS and Apple's software are designed to run with very little resource usage. TS4, not so much.

Now, do you mean slow as in taking a long time to load, long loading screens when traveling, etc? Or do you mean slow as in low frame rate and constant lagging?

If the game is slow in loading etc, trying a new save as mentioned is a good place to start. I know that sim inventories also can cause problems if they fill up and your sim(s) are toting around a million things with them. If a new save doesn't help, you can go one step further and go into your user documents folder, find the "The Sims 4" folder, and rename it, and then start the game. It will not recognize the renamed folder, and will instead create a brand new folder, as if you had just installed the game. If performance is better in the new game, you can start trying to copy things over from the old set of folders into the new game. (Provided you want to save your games and not just start over.)

Alternatively, if the game is slow and lagging visually, that's almost to be expected from a MBA. Do you know if you have an i5 or an i7 model? The i5 is kind of pitiful at only two cores running at a base of 1.6GHz. You're probably also going to get some thermal throttling that is going to lock down the processor speed due to heat generated from the game, preventing TurboBoost from kicking in. (The MBA is so small, it doesn't exactly have room for beefy fans to cool things down.) Also be aware that with integrated graphics, it's being powered by the processor, when in a standard set-up, the processor and graphics are two separate entities. One component can only do so much.

For visual performance issues, try turning down your graphic settings and play in a smaller window instead of fullscreen. The fewer pixels the computer has to fill in the game window, the faster it can fill each frame. Also note the size of the lot you are playing on, and how full it is, and what kind of lighting is has. A large, heavily decorated lot with lots of lights is going to perform slower than a smaller, emptier lot. Use multiple floors to break up large lots so that the entire house isn't being displayed at once.