game freezes every few seconds

piddlesim

Hello all! I am hoping that someone can help me. I was a long time sims player. I own every expansion and stuff pack for the sims 3. I had to stop playing for almost a year due to health reasons. Now I am back and able to play. I sadly opened origin and it was set to auto update the sims 3. So now I am stuck with the final sims 3 origin update. I figured out that now I have to open origin and use the launcher to play. I hate that, but at least I can load my game.

My issue is that I loaded up my last save. My game now seems to be stuttering and stopping every few seconds. I have a few hacks or mods. I do have the overwatch mod and the most current versions of my mods.

I deleted the cache files. I have tried a new game, instead of my old save. Yet the freezing seems to be happening every 20-30 seconds. I do have v-sync set up in my nvidia control panel. Fps show it going no higher than 60 fps. Yet it does seem to drop a lot though.

This stuttering and freezing issue never happened before. I am at a loss as to what to do. Anyone have any tips or ideas?

Thanks!

edit to add: I have a gtx760 card. I know it is older, but I can't afford a new pc at the moment. I have an i7-4770 cpu and 12 gigs of ram. So it shouldn't really be a pc problem. My video card drivers are updated as well.

igazor

It might help if we can narrow down whether the stutter/freeze is happening only in your older ongoing game save or if it follows you over if you start a new test game in a known to be gentle to play world (Sunset Valley, Riverview, Twinbrook). Further to that:

-- Which world(s) are you playing in? A couple of them like Isla Paradiso and Bridgeport are going to be problematic unless steps are taken to fix them.

-- A prior thread of yours, from a while back, expressed concern over your Nvidia card's frame rates, although we never found out which card you working with. What kind of fps are you getting in-game? Shift+Ctrl+C to bring up the cheats console, type fps on (enter). As you play and move the game camera around, the displayed frame rate should never exceed the refresh rate of your monitor. Usually that's 60 Hz, so 60 fps but some monitors can run higher. To make the displayed fps rate go away, cheats console again and fps off (enter).

Uncapped frame rates will lead to lag, stutter, graphics glitches, screen tears, crashes, and can ultimately burn out your graphics card if it gets overworked needlessly. The usual tools to fix this if still an issue are the Nvidia Control Panel, Nvidia Inspector, or RivaTuner Stats Server (RTSS), that last one especially for AMD cards where the built-in tools don't lock things in.

And beyond that, we would need to know more about the specs of the computer you are playing on. A dxdiag report might help. If you choose to provide one, it would have to be split into multiple responses here as it would be far too long to fit into one or else use pastebin.com and provide a link to it.
https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information

piddlesim

Thank you for the reply.

I was playing in Island Paradiso. Eek at it being problematic. It looked so pretty. I did just google and found a fixed recommended version at mts. So I will download that later.

I won't be able to play or test any saves for the next few days, since I am not at home right now. But my next available chance, I will rename my sims 3 folder and generate a new one. Then I will load up an untouched world and try it out. I will report back in a few days if the lag and stutter remains.

My graphics card is a gtx760 NVidia card. It is an older card, but it is a 4gb card.

I do have the v-sync turned on in the NVidia control panel. In game while using the fps on cheat, the fps is capped at 60.

I am currently not at my pc ( posting on my tablet ), so I can't post a dxdiag at the moment. But I will try to do that sometime this week.

Thank you again for your reply! I am hoping that the issue was just that I was playing in the IP world. *crosses fingers*

igazor

Ah, maybe I should have asked which world you were playing in and just stopped there.

Almost no one can play an unfixed version of Isla Paradiso properly. The world is so heavily design-flawed that many inactive sims cannot get into and out of their own houses. Even if you are paying no attention to the rest of the town, the game engine tends to go crazy constantly trying to re-route these sims where they need to go, thousands of times per second, and the resulting quality of gameplay becomes garbage.

The fixed underlying world by EllaCharmed is a good start, all of her fixed worlds are good, but in this case it won't be enough to fix everything. You would also have to abandon or set aside your ongoing game to make use of it, the fixes only apply when a new instance of the world is generated for play. I would suggest taking a look at this thread. Ciane has a fixed up save of Isla Paradiso all ready to play and she documents what she has done in the pages that follow for the Do It Yourself crowd. In addition, many of us find NRaas Overwatch, ErrorTrap, Register, Traffic, and GoHere to be indispensable in playing any world but especially potentially flawed ones.
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/811253/removing-ip-lag/p1

The other way is to not play in Isla Paradiso. It's very pretty, but the IP expansion content can be used elsewhere. There are many player designed custom tropical worlds out there for use without all of the design flaws. Any world can have Resorts. Houseboats and dive lots do require water of a certain depth so those won't work right in all other worlds, though they will in some and many of the custom ones allow for these.