@ZeeGee: hey I'm sorry if I seemed dismissive of people's problems. Bad at keeping up with the thread + thinking my graphics were fixed would do that. Here's some horrible skin artifacts taken yesterday as penance: https://imgur.com/S7ZMk3e (Imgur link so you can zoom in)
Playing tech support is fun until it isn't. I wish I had something better to say. :-\
@InfraGreen Oh no I didn't think that at all! But ugh, that skin looks bad. Total pixel vomit. :sick:
@SuzyCue72 That made me snort my drink out my nose
Out of time again! I did get some pics taken but I want to get more. And i'm changing the heading of this thread again.
My game has been affected but it doesn't bother me
Incoming screenshot spam. Sorry about that.
I took @ZeeGee 's recommendation and grabbed some photos of the Goth, Andrews, and Hart families, both in the morning and afternoon, for comparison. These are from before the *2020-08 Cumulative Update Preview* (sure) for .NET; I took the same screenshots afterwards and didn't notice any difference. In each case, the first screenshots are from somewhere between 8 and 9 am, and the second are from between 2 and 3 pm, because they don't hold still and I didn't want to keep reloading. The sims are standing side by side, but I zoomed in on each separately.
These were all taken on full ultra settings minus high-detail lots, at 2560x1440, in a fully updated Windows 10 1903, in fullscreen mode, with no other tweaks applied to the graphics settings. I used clean folders, no mods or cc.
I think the worst parts here are Gunther's chest and the neckline of Mortimer's shirt, and of course the sims' arms bleeding into the water.
There's striping on Victoria's right arm and pixel vomit on Beau's right forearm in the morning, and both in the afternoon.
The Harts mostly look okay, at least to me, aside from Gus being ridiculous.
This is Cornelia's skirt with her back to the sun, left at 8 am, right at 3 pm:
Bonus pic of the awful-looking wallpaper in the Hart kitchen:
Finally, I tried @Emily4331 's HQ edit, and I added a couple other edits to graphicsrules as well, just to see what would happen. This is a close-up of Gunther's chest at 8 am. Top is without edits, bottom is with.
Edit: It's interesting how much... less bad... the screenshots look when posted here. Maybe imgur compresses them somewhat. Gunther's is the only one where I can fully see what I see in the originals, and even then, the pixel vomit on his shirt is much more subtle.
The real issues are worse color banding and the pixilation of sims' skins and faces, especially some of the CC skins which were completely ruined by the update. The pixilation issue especially affects sims with darker skin color or who are out at night time. Installing Reshade and editing the color banding option does help with this issue and Archivist provided instructions for that on this thread.
Color banding has always been an issue in The Sims 3 but it's gotten worse ever since I started playing on Windows 10.
Until two months ago, I was still on Windows 7 but I had to "upgrade" to W10 when I built a new PC with a new Ryzen CPU (which isn't supported on 7). I'm not as unsatisfied with Windows 10 as I thought I'd be, but I've been having issues with older games.
All three Sims games have some issues. The Sims 1 had issues with my older saves and I would take MINUTES to save a game (it should take 2 seconds), so I had to start with a clean folder. The Sims 2 has DirectSound issues (missing sounds, DirectSound errors, hang-ups and occasional crashes). And Sims 3 does look worse now than it did before, even with settings maxed out and some additional enhancements like anisotropic filtering. The issues are related to pixelation and worse color banding than ever before. It's not as bad as some of the screenshots I see here though.
@naus So sorry. I tried to get a Windows 7 puter when this first came out and there was no way. The only alternative is Linux and I'm just not tech savvy enough to keep that going.
I just noticed something absolutely insane. There's COLOR BANDING in The Sims 1 as well:
There's a plethora of graphical glitches and other issues in TS1 as well. TS2 has its own issues (mainly related to sound). Windows 10 is definitely not good for playing older games.
Okay, here are my pics. This is on boot up, no default skin. It's 8:02 am. I changed Cornelia's hair so you could see her face better, and the rest of the pics will be in a spoiler so the thread will still load okay.
I decided to order them by comparison instead of time. So the 8 am shots are followed by the 10 pm shots. What I noticed is that the 10 pm photos are much worse but it doesn't show up in the pictures as bad as it really looks. BIG SPOILER WITH LOTS OF PICS!!!
And the Hart's kitchen to compare with puzzlezaddict:
@MsDaisy Yes And it all happened one Saturday night in early December while I slept.
I'm still working on the spoiler pics. I decided to rearrange them to show the night pic right after the day pic and it's a nightmare lol Edit: DONE! Finally.
This is as bad as it gets for me in terms of color banding. The game looks pretty good overall but the color banding truly ruins it for me. Just look at my Sim's tank top (the blond one).
My game has been affected but it doesn't bother me
I've been meaning to get screenshots from my Mac, which is still running Sierra (from 2016, and yes, I know), for comparison. This is complicated by the fact that I can't even play in anything close to my Mac's native resolution—the game won't even get past the splash screen. (The macOS port is truly terrible.) So I got all new screenshots, all at 1280x800 and with the same ultra settings minus water and high detail lots, because I didn't want my Mac to disown me.
Side note: fps was 20(!) in macOS with these settings, even with only WA, Ambitions, Generations, and a couple SPs installed, and in Sunset Valley of all places. The macOS port is truly terrible.
For all these screenshots, Mac is on the left, Windows is in the middle, and Windows plus some HQ edits is on the right. Pay no attention to the thin vertical line in some of the Mac screenshots; it can't be helped.
Beau seems to look better in HQ, but the Mac version isn't bad.
Beau's arm looks equally bad no matter what. I turned up sharpness, exposure, and contrast, so imgur wouldn't completely ruin the effect this time, although it looks a lot worse in its original form.
This is Victoria's arm, similarly edited and looking similarly bad. Was it always like this? I can't even remember.
This is Gunther's chest, with sharpness maxed out twice but no other changes. Edit: I'm glad to see the dots and other noise show up now.
I know the level of detail, particularly on the clothing, is a lot worse in macOS. The game doesn't look like that; I think it's an artifact of some compression, probably the same reason there are vertical lines in the screenshots.
But it's not the point. The point is with a driver written specifically for macOS, one that hasn't been updated in forever, the game still looks bad, although of course playing on a MacBook Pro isn't supposed to be ideal conditions. It does make me wonder though if Windows had some graphics optimization that isn't there anymore.
It does make me wonder though if Windows had some graphics optimization that isn't there anymore.
That is an interesting theory. I wonder if that's what happened. My game definitely did not look like this before. And I'm positive because I filmed all night specific scenes, booted up the computer the next day, had to reset all my Sims 3 graphics options so obviously Windows did something, and my game was very different. The first thing I noticed was Cassandra, who has darker skin, had color banding all over her neck that was not there the night before. Then when I went to the piano scene Gunther's suit was so pixelated it looked ridiculous. The wood was green and shiny too. So Windows did SOMETHING or I would not have had to reset all my options when I booted the game. Thanks for all the pic comparisons.
ETA: Though if that's what the game looks like in Mac no wonder people complain about the graphics.
@ZeeGee If your settings were back to default that points towards a DRIVER update. The Sims 3 discarts the DeviceConfig file everytime the GUID for your GPU Driver version changes.
Maybe it's NOT a Windows issue. Maybe it's an issue with our GPU's drivers. Do you guys have Nvidia GPUs? Does this issue happen to people with AMD or Intel GPUs?
EDIT: I did some googling and it could in fact be an issue with DITHERING for Nvidia/Intel GPUs. Some driver update disabled dithering for Windows.
Honestly, I give up on this. I feel like it's just a problem with certain games and other applications that I'll just have to deal with by messing around with my Freestyle settings to make it look good enough for me. Anyway, it's just solid color objects that have this horrendous color banding, so an easy fix is to just apply even the simplest pattern to them soo yeah I'm going to do that. The pixel vomit is another story, but at least for more detailed CC skins my HQ settings eliminate that problem and for normal gameplay it doesn't matter to me as much, so my Freestyle settings should also be able to at least make me semi happy with how it looks.
Comments
@InfraGreen Oh no I didn't think that at all! But ugh, that skin looks bad. Total pixel vomit. :sick:
@SuzyCue72 That made me snort my drink out my nose
Out of time again! I did get some pics taken but I want to get more. And i'm changing the heading of this thread again.
@MsDaisy Oh that's bad
@Emily4331 Lol!
I took @ZeeGee 's recommendation and grabbed some photos of the Goth, Andrews, and Hart families, both in the morning and afternoon, for comparison. These are from before the *2020-08 Cumulative Update Preview* (sure) for .NET; I took the same screenshots afterwards and didn't notice any difference. In each case, the first screenshots are from somewhere between 8 and 9 am, and the second are from between 2 and 3 pm, because they don't hold still and I didn't want to keep reloading. The sims are standing side by side, but I zoomed in on each separately.
These were all taken on full ultra settings minus high-detail lots, at 2560x1440, in a fully updated Windows 10 1903, in fullscreen mode, with no other tweaks applied to the graphics settings. I used clean folders, no mods or cc.
I think the worst parts here are Gunther's chest and the neckline of Mortimer's shirt, and of course the sims' arms bleeding into the water.
There's striping on Victoria's right arm and pixel vomit on Beau's right forearm in the morning, and both in the afternoon.
The Harts mostly look okay, at least to me, aside from Gus being ridiculous.
This is Cornelia's skirt with her back to the sun, left at 8 am, right at 3 pm:
Bonus pic of the awful-looking wallpaper in the Hart kitchen:
Finally, I tried @Emily4331 's HQ edit, and I added a couple other edits to graphicsrules as well, just to see what would happen. This is a close-up of Gunther's chest at 8 am. Top is without edits, bottom is with.
Edit: It's interesting how much... less bad... the screenshots look when posted here. Maybe imgur compresses them somewhat. Gunther's is the only one where I can fully see what I see in the originals, and even then, the pixel vomit on his shirt is much more subtle.
Color banding has always been an issue in The Sims 3 but it's gotten worse ever since I started playing on Windows 10.
Until two months ago, I was still on Windows 7 but I had to "upgrade" to W10 when I built a new PC with a new Ryzen CPU (which isn't supported on 7). I'm not as unsatisfied with Windows 10 as I thought I'd be, but I've been having issues with older games.
All three Sims games have some issues. The Sims 1 had issues with my older saves and I would take MINUTES to save a game (it should take 2 seconds), so I had to start with a clean folder. The Sims 2 has DirectSound issues (missing sounds, DirectSound errors, hang-ups and occasional crashes). And Sims 3 does look worse now than it did before, even with settings maxed out and some additional enhancements like anisotropic filtering. The issues are related to pixelation and worse color banding than ever before. It's not as bad as some of the screenshots I see here though.
The absolute worse is darker skinned sims at night.
I do have pictures and hopefully will get a chance to upload and post them tomorrow! Busy day today.
There's a plethora of graphical glitches and other issues in TS1 as well. TS2 has its own issues (mainly related to sound). Windows 10 is definitely not good for playing older games.
I decided to order them by comparison instead of time. So the 8 am shots are followed by the 10 pm shots. What I noticed is that the 10 pm photos are much worse but it doesn't show up in the pictures as bad as it really looks.
BIG SPOILER WITH LOTS OF PICS!!!
And the Hart's kitchen to compare with puzzlezaddict:
I'm still working on the spoiler pics. I decided to rearrange them to show the night pic right after the day pic and it's a nightmare lol Edit: DONE! Finally.
@Emily4331 Poor little Spongebob... but I think he's kind of cute actually, not ugly.
@ZeeGee Haha!
Side note: fps was 20(!) in macOS with these settings, even with only WA, Ambitions, Generations, and a couple SPs installed, and in Sunset Valley of all places. The macOS port is truly terrible.
For all these screenshots, Mac is on the left, Windows is in the middle, and Windows plus some HQ edits is on the right. Pay no attention to the thin vertical line in some of the Mac screenshots; it can't be helped.
Beau seems to look better in HQ, but the Mac version isn't bad.
Beau's arm looks equally bad no matter what. I turned up sharpness, exposure, and contrast, so imgur wouldn't completely ruin the effect this time, although it looks a lot worse in its original form.
This is Victoria's arm, similarly edited and looking similarly bad. Was it always like this? I can't even remember.
This is Gunther's chest, with sharpness maxed out twice but no other changes.
Edit: I'm glad to see the dots and other noise show up now.
I know the level of detail, particularly on the clothing, is a lot worse in macOS. The game doesn't look like that; I think it's an artifact of some compression, probably the same reason there are vertical lines in the screenshots.
But it's not the point. The point is with a driver written specifically for macOS, one that hasn't been updated in forever, the game still looks bad, although of course playing on a MacBook Pro isn't supposed to be ideal conditions. It does make me wonder though if Windows had some graphics optimization that isn't there anymore.
That is an interesting theory. I wonder if that's what happened. My game definitely did not look like this before. And I'm positive because I filmed all night specific scenes, booted up the computer the next day, had to reset all my Sims 3 graphics options so obviously Windows did something, and my game was very different. The first thing I noticed was Cassandra, who has darker skin, had color banding all over her neck that was not there the night before. Then when I went to the piano scene Gunther's suit was so pixelated it looked ridiculous. The wood was green and shiny too. So Windows did SOMETHING or I would not have had to reset all my options when I booted the game.
ETA: Though if that's what the game looks like in Mac no wonder people complain about the graphics.
My laptop and desktop and see if there’s any difference
https://graceymanorsims3.tumblr.com/
Maybe it's NOT a Windows issue. Maybe it's an issue with our GPU's drivers. Do you guys have Nvidia GPUs? Does this issue happen to people with AMD or Intel GPUs?
EDIT: I did some googling and it could in fact be an issue with DITHERING for Nvidia/Intel GPUs. Some driver update disabled dithering for Windows.
outrun / blog / tunglr
I went here http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php#gradient-h.png to see if it was my monitor or GPU settings or anything like that and I pass that test with flying colors, zero color banding.