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The Sims 3 stuttering a fair bit
UnseenHorizon
Posts: 212 Member
So I've returned to playing The Sims 3 after an extensive break but I've experienced stuttering problems and I'm trying to figure out if it's just "the game being the game" (age and everything) or there's something I should be changing. I'll run off what expansions I have installed, NRaas/misc mods, things I've already tried, etc. I can post dxdiag on request and I have successfully managed to get the game to recognise my graphics card already.
It mostly consists of simulation stuttering from either moving the camera around a lot/map view at any simulation speed or just not moving around at all and watching the Sims animations freeze up and then fix themselves after about 5 seconds or so. Speed 1 seems to be the most stable but it still happens a lot and I can't wrap my head around it.
Primarily I use speed 3 and have done so in the past without any issues towards gameplay but seems like something changed and started causing problems? I bought a new PC around a year and a half ago and hadn't tried The Sims 3 properly up until recently so it could be just a modern system thing but I'm not sure.
Here's a list of the expansions and any mods I use:
Expansions
Stuff Packs
Mods
May just need to chill with the mods but I've found these useful for day to day tweaking and management of world stuff and had no issues before. Every time I've cleaned out the cache files and checked CurrentGame is empty before starting the game, always Save As, and quit and reload the game if I'm loading save files.
Anyway thank you for reading.
Edit 1: Should have mentioned that I have followed several guides on the internet already for ensuring best peformance
Edit 2: I'm also using the "fixed" versions of the EA worlds and currently reside on Twinbrook
It mostly consists of simulation stuttering from either moving the camera around a lot/map view at any simulation speed or just not moving around at all and watching the Sims animations freeze up and then fix themselves after about 5 seconds or so. Speed 1 seems to be the most stable but it still happens a lot and I can't wrap my head around it.
Primarily I use speed 3 and have done so in the past without any issues towards gameplay but seems like something changed and started causing problems? I bought a new PC around a year and a half ago and hadn't tried The Sims 3 properly up until recently so it could be just a modern system thing but I'm not sure.
Here's a list of the expansions and any mods I use:
Expansions
- The Sims 3
- The Sims 3 Ambitions
- The Sims 3 Pets
- The Sims 3 Seasons
- The Sims 3 Generations
- The Sims 3 Showtime
- The Sims 3 Late Night
- The Sims 3 World Adventures
Stuff Packs
- The Sims 3 Fast Lane Stuff
- The Sims 3 High-End Loft Stuff
- The Sims 3 Master Suite Stuff
- The Sims 3 Outdoor Living Stuff
Mods
- No Intro
- NRaas Overwatch
- NRaas ErrorTrap
- NRaas MasterController
- NRaas MasterController Cheats
- NRaas MasterController Progression
- NRaas GoHere
- NRaas Decensor
- NRaas Mover
- NRaas Traveller (WA fixes)
- NRaas Dreamer
- NRaas Dresser
- NRaas OnceRead (surely you know the answer to "Where's Bella?" by reading it the first tme)
- NRaas PortraitPanel
- NRaas Register
- NRaas Retuner (no, stop with the date calls, bad, she's married)
- NRaas Saver
- NRaas SecondImage
- NRaas StoryProgression (marked bold as it's supposedly more of a hog)
- NRaas StoryProgression Extra
- NRaas StoryProgression Money
- NRaas StoryProgression Population
- NRaas StoryProgression Relationship
- NRaas Tagger
- NRaas Tempest
- NRaas Traffic (tried turning down the amount of taxis)
- NRaas WrittenWord
- More Entry Points Version 1 EA (noticed a lot of kids/teens trying to enter school in the morning so needed to address them getting stuck)
May just need to chill with the mods but I've found these useful for day to day tweaking and management of world stuff and had no issues before. Every time I've cleaned out the cache files and checked CurrentGame is empty before starting the game, always Save As, and quit and reload the game if I'm loading save files.
Anyway thank you for reading.
Edit 1: Should have mentioned that I have followed several guides on the internet already for ensuring best peformance
Edit 2: I'm also using the "fixed" versions of the EA worlds and currently reside on Twinbrook
"Hosting indoor firework shows since '00"
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
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Comments
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
Have you manually capped your in-game framerates? I don't know what graphics card you have, but even a mid-range dedicated card can produce extremely high fps if allowed, which can cause all kinds of performance issues in addition to being bad for the long-term health of the card. To see your framerates, bring up the cheats console (crtl-shift-C) and enter "fps on" without quotes. A number will appear in the upper right corner of your screen, and it should never go above the refresh rate of your monitor.
If you need help capping fps, let us know what kind of card you have, or cards if it's a laptop, and whether you like to use windowed mode at times.
If you're already playing in SV (or Twinbrook, or Riverview) and fps isn't an issue, then it would be useful to see a dxdiag.
I'm currently on Twinbrook but the fixed MTS variant (whether this has performance issues idk) and I've experienced the same problem on Sunset Valley as well. My frame rate is manually capped via V-Sync in NVIDIA Control Panel and I've experimented with triple buffering but can't really tell much of a difference. I always check my in-game FPS and only spot small frame drops occasionally when moving the camera around.
Here's a link to my dxdiag as it's way too long for plain text here.
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
More relevantly, your dxdiag lists a few different errors that might be affecting performance. Razer's GameManagerService crashed a few times, so try disabling it before playing; you can find it in the Task Manager's background processes list. It will reenable itself when you restart your computer. If that doesn't help, try playing in a clean boot:
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-clean-boot-windows-10
You'll still need to go through the Task Manager to make sure all nonessential processes are shut down—these days, a number of different apps, everything from MSI Afterburner to RGB software, don't get disabled in a clean boot.
There are also a couple BlueScreens in your dxdiag, and a couple serious errors related to the USB 3 driver. Dxdiag errors don't have timestamps, so it isn't clear when these happened, but it's worth checking anyway. Open a File Explorer window and enter C:\Windows\Minidump in the address bar. For any files you find, right-click and select Copy, then right-click on your desktop and select Paste. (The system won't let you drag and drop, as this is a protected directory.) Zip the files together if you have more than one; please upload the .zip to Dropbox and link it here.
I will take another look at Sunset Valley with a new save to see if I can spot anything out of the ordinary.
I've uninstalled Razer Synapse as I don't really use it for anything other than the RGB profiles and the backlight stuff still works anyway without it.
These blue screens have been going on for a few months now (even before I even started playing TS3 again) and I've been scratching my head figuring out what was causing them. If you can figure that out I'd actually really appreciate it because I've tried updating drivers, checking system files, memory diagnostics and a clean install.
Attached is a link to a ZIP of dump files from the past week or so.
EDIT: Formatting
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
My main Twinbrook save I'm using right now is around a week old and I have cleaned it up to see if there's any improvement but it's still weird.
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
World Adventures - I can add 10 sims to my town and there's no impact on performance, if I let 10 sims come as tourists...I have more stuttering and routing issues. Weird, so I disable tourists. Register>Tourists>Allow Tourists = False
Showtime - I've heard the performance career limos for this pack can get stuck on the road and cause performance issues. They will be cleaned up nightly by..overwatch? But I just disable them. Traffic>Routing>Allow performance career limo>false. I also don't place the Showtime lots unless my household is doing performance careers, to reduce role sims. I'd rather have more late night lots.
Late Night - You already did the taxi thing I see. If I'm not in an urban area, I also disable food trucks. Traffic>Food Truck>max food trucks = 0. And the ice cream trucks, same thing just in the ice cream truck settings. If I download a late night lot and it has two bars, I remodel to have one bar to reduce role sims. You're probably seeing a pattern, I remove sims that don't add much value to my planned playthrough and it seems to have impacted performance positively on my machine.
Nraas Story Progression - I'm not sure of the impact of this mod. In the beginning of the game it seems to negatively effect performance but then over time improves it beyond what I was getting without it installed. Maybe it prevents problems that EA progression would have caused later down the line. One thing this mod does that's not helpful to me is send me story updates on everyone in town. My game stutters for just a second whenever it sends me an update and I would prefer to have to interact with sims to learn details of their life anyway, so I disable the feature. Story Progression>Town Options> Stories: Allow = False.
Twinbrook - The fixed maps are generally a good idea. I don't use the one for Twinbrook though. The amphitheater was messed up when I used that map. The road ended in a large cliff and the lot was sunken into the ground quite a bit. I didn't leave it installed long enough to know if it causes issues. Maybe check if the lots are broken on that map? Twinbrook has inconsistent performance on my machine. It has serious issues with stuttering downtown and has routing issues...except all the times when it doesn't. The difference? I never know. I've recently moved my sim out of that town.
Moving - If all else fails, consider moving to Mesa Grande. I've never had as smooth of performance with any other town, including Sunset Valley. It's base game, requires CC that's included as a package file (custom rabbit holes and flowers). It can easily be upgraded for later expansions as it has plenty of upgrade space. The creator did make some of the updated lots such as a festival lot for seasons. A Fire Station, junkyard, consignment store, laundromat, and a salon for Ambitions.
Seasons - I put this last cause I don't think most people would be willing to do this. Besides the cpu file settings changes, the largest positive impact on the particular issues you spoke of, stuttering while turning the camera, in map view, and moving between lots was...uninstalling Seasons. Even if I live in a warmer place where I use nraas or EA settings to suppress it's effects in every way, even without festival lots..just having the EP installed makes all that very stuttery and slow. I also get irritated when I go to Egypt and find a cheap flower at the Tiberium spawn points. I do really miss the festivals though, also the snow. But I've learned to live without it.
I've done this as suggested, not sure if it will make much of a difference but less sims (especially ones I don't care about
Pretty sure mine are cleaned up every night but I'll keep this in mind for future saves if I decide not to ever take the performance career route.
This is interesting as the majority of taxis I see are actually real Sims moving around (particularly I see a lot turn up at the school in the morning bringing kids, teens and adults. As for ice cream trucks and food trucks I don't really use them even if they visit my lot and I don't ever see sims autonomously using them either. Not a huge loss either, maybe something better if it were tuned to be only in the summer?
Yeah, I've set it so stories will only be from blood (even those who have moved out but I'm still interested in keeping track of) and friends which I may turn off in case anybody happens to decide to become a social butterfly and nuke my performance later.
Hmm, the only thing I've really noticed is visual problems but I don't know if that's just related to graphics settings or texturing problems with the map? I'll attach a few screenshots below to show you what I mean but I'll definitely consider moving at some later stage in the save.
What is with the weird white outline on my home lot?
Is it supposed to look like this?
I haven't explored and experienced every EA world yet but I'll keep custom worlds in mind. Sounds pretty interesting though.
I tend to keep it around for the variation to the game world every in-game month (or so) but it sounds plausible that the effects would cause performance problems... hmm...
Thank you the reply anyway and I'll some of your suggestions a shot.
Edit: Formatting
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
Two of the newer five minidumps show a problem with the USB 3 driver, and the others with a component of Windows that manages other processes. It's possible that Windows itself is corrupt, so it's a good idea to run a couple of basic checks of your Windows system files:
- Hit Windows key-X
- Choose either “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator),” whichever option is offered
- Inside the window that appears, enter “DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth” without quotes
- The system will start validating soon. If it throws an error, please list it here
- After it reaches 100%, hit Windows key-X again
- Again, choose “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator)”
- Inside the window, enter “sfc /scannow” without quotes
- Post the message you receive
Please list all the USB devices you have plugged in, and let me know if you've noticed more problems when one of them is in use. The two USB errors are from November 26 and 28, with none since.Please also list the USB device drivers installed. Hit Windows key-X, open the Device Manager, expand the Universal Serial Bus controllers section, and either take a screenshot or copy and paste the names.
https://www.nraas.net/community/storyprogression-discussion/topic9350
In fact, it might be worth taking out all the SP add-ons and slowing progression down to see whether it helps. If it does, you may need to slow down some of the individual managers to take some of the load off the game engine.
If I find my game to be smooth and playable enough on Speed 1, that's plenty for me to work with. When all of my sims are asleep and/or in rabbitholes and that gets too boring to watch, I use the still normal clock time to look over the rest of the world for changes I may want to make and to snoop on the neighbors.
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
I haven't installed a new motherboard since I got this build, it has always been a GIGABYTE GA-A320M-H with the only component changes being RAM but again both the old and new RAM had no issues when checked with memory diagnostics. So it signalling a completely different motherboard is new to me.
I've checked system files through sfc and DISM before multiple and they've come up clean but I've zipped up the log files including the screenshot of the USB devices from Device Manager you asked for.
Here's a list of the USB devices that I'm using:
I haven't noticed anything really out of the ordinary besides the volume wheel on the keyboard being a little janky with volume adjustments but that could just be the keyboard itself.
(Apologies if this is kind of skewing off topic with the PC problems)
On the topic of The Sims 3, I'll give that suggestion with SP Money a go and report if I see any improvements.
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
This could just be it, the game was never very stable to begin with but I've never experienced problems this bad before. I can definitely relate to spying on the neighbours though, personally chose not to install HomeOpener because of performance concerns so I'll occasionally just use MC to open up any houses I'm curious about and see what's going on. (Think of a giant person sitting cross-legged beside a house and using their hand to tear off the roof and peer inside before getting bored and just slamming the roof back on)
I may just need to remove any really non-essential mods, specifically ones that aren't around to fix something EA did (wait isn't that all of them?) and hope that there's some kind of improvement.
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
Yeah, I thought not. I may just return to using legacy worlds and rely on Overwatch and ErrorTrap to pick up anybody getting stuck and send them on their way. Seems like I'll have to move everybody out to a different legacy world in that case and figure out what to do from there.
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
Not sure what else I can really do about this but I'll keep an eye on things.
Currently trying to pick up The Sims 3 again
You can find me lurking around The Sims 3 board, feel free to say hi!
You can also lock the fps with riva tuner.
Imo, I haven't seen the game on any pc, mine or friends, youtubers, being able to lock at 60 without hitching so being that it runs so well at 30 I keep it at just that and forget about it.
Give it a try and see for yourself and.... maybe save yourself the headache.
Forgot to mention how to set it up LOL
In nvidia inspector I set the sync to 1/2 refresh rate, set my ingame refresh to 60, then I set the fps to 30 in riva tuner.
This together makes for a perfect frame time no matter how much I scroll around. Tried this at 60 too but stutter was still there.