Forum Announcement, Click Here to Read More From EA_Cade.
Is this as good as it gets more or less?
SimKeats
Posts: 2,186 Member
So this is a performance question:
I have the game installed on an SSD that does about 500ish MB/s, I have my system files and sims document folder on an NVME drive thats about 3500MB/s. I have an amd 3700x CPU, and a Radeon 5700 XT video card. Also not that it matters but I have 64gb of 3600mhz ram.
I set vsync to on on my video card to limit FPS so its not like 3606 FPS lol.
I have pretty much all the NRAAS mods and a few others to make things run smoothly.
I mean, it runs ok, but it still takes minutes to load a save, and still has a stutter or hiccup sometimes. Is this because its 32 bit? Any other game I have runs good and loads faster, even big open world games. Oh, I take that back, I have one game that ironicly takes longer to load and has even lower system specs, Rimworld.
Would doing something crazy like installing Mac OS on bootcamp to run the game in 64 bit make it better at all? I love this game but I play it less and less because between games loading faster and looking better all the time, Sims 3 has a hard time competing with my ADHD just to get into the game.
I have the game installed on an SSD that does about 500ish MB/s, I have my system files and sims document folder on an NVME drive thats about 3500MB/s. I have an amd 3700x CPU, and a Radeon 5700 XT video card. Also not that it matters but I have 64gb of 3600mhz ram.
I set vsync to on on my video card to limit FPS so its not like 3606 FPS lol.
I have pretty much all the NRAAS mods and a few others to make things run smoothly.
I mean, it runs ok, but it still takes minutes to load a save, and still has a stutter or hiccup sometimes. Is this because its 32 bit? Any other game I have runs good and loads faster, even big open world games. Oh, I take that back, I have one game that ironicly takes longer to load and has even lower system specs, Rimworld.
Would doing something crazy like installing Mac OS on bootcamp to run the game in 64 bit make it better at all? I love this game but I play it less and less because between games loading faster and looking better all the time, Sims 3 has a hard time competing with my ADHD just to get into the game.
0
Comments
Bootcamp is a means of installing Windows on an Intel-chipped Mac. Not a means of installing the macOS on a PC that shipped with Windows. Maybe I got confused by that paragraph. But however one gets to it, the new 64-bit Mac version of TS3 has plenty of its own problems and it still uses exactly the same game engine (Patch level is 1.70). It doesn't really perform remarkably better just because the RAM limit has been lifted, the game would have to have been re-engineered to take advantage of 64-bit programming in order for that to happen. Instead, EA kind of forced the game to run, somehow, as it was, in a 64-bit only environment. I find it unplayable because elements that I didn't realize were so important to my gameplay like interacting with the open water (oceans) and terrain paints, among others, turned out to be more important than I thought. And I still can't say that version of the game is bastion of reliability and stability, but EA never proclaimed it to be either.
Others are thrilled to have it because for them, on their existing hardware, there was/is no other way for them to run the game.
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
What makes the biggest differences in load time, expansion packs, store content, or mods? I mean, it probably depends on how much of any of those.
My sims 3 folder in documents is like 23.8gb which is less than my 32.2gb of the main sims folder.
And also, often get wacky issues with service sims getting stuck, and overwatch not unstucking them, and resetting them seems like a very brief fix.
Regarding your stuck service sims, do you mean role sims that fail to age up? At least that's a common thing in my games. I may just reset their age to 0 days in their age span (Master Controller>Intermediate>Age absolute (or similar)) or remove them by Total Annihilation, if the reset or "trigger age transition" won't work. I don't experience any stuck service sims.
In one of the Savvy Seller stores I built, in one game only, there was a sim who constantly got stuck. I finally watched her getting stuck and she wanted to walk the wrong way around a table so I removed the table and she never got stuck again. That table in that store had been in numerous previous games and later games too without a single other sim noticing that table or getting stuck.
I just removed a few GB of custom content from my mods folder and it made a difference. I was surprised when I launched the game I was playing that I didn't get a missing objects notification.
Try to keep inventories close to empty. I recently had a world with not many townies in it and it was grinding to a halt so I decided to do an audit of their inventories and they were bursting so I moved all that stuff out of there and the game ran much better after that. I mentioned doing that on here and others said that is something they do in their games on a regular basis. I usually only do it for the sims in my own household.
I can bring my game to a screaming halt by using the tractor to harvest (or the green dragon). This is because I don't realise how many harvestables go into the active sim's inventory. I've timed my sim taking a literal 5 minutes real time to take each and every step when trying to walk. But when an inventory gets that full it can be really painful to empty it as it counts down each and every single item in the inventory. The countdown does speed up after a while as the inventory gets empties. In the worst case I've managed to have so far I think there multiple thousands of several of the harvestables.
Another way I managed to seize up the game to a similar processing speed was trying to make a rainforest on an island and hide my casino inside it. All those trees and bushes waving in the wind stopped my sims walking again. So I removed the plants and the game ran beautifully again.
There are limitless ways we can slow down or speed up a game. I'm learning new ones all the time. One of my current favourites is to have about 30 sims in the household. Then I start removing them one at a time until the game becomes playable again.
I hope you sort out your issues and get the performance you need.
Happy Simming
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuW44b3uCMtCSaq4gwC8EZg
But seriously, it is possible to play and progress a game/town forever with the help of the mods, theoretically. But it can't keep expanding "naturally" and the player does have to keep a close eye on things like population growth, ever growing household inventories, age-stuck Role Sims, and keep such under control. After a while even I have to imagine that a world will become more work than fun to play, family trees are not going reflect an infinite number of generations properly if they even still work in-game, and it might time to uproot things to keep playing forward just to recapture the sheer enjoyment of the game and those sims and their descendants even if one doesn't really HAVE to. Or, heavens forbid, just start over?
All really good comments here though, that seem to more or less agree with the above.
The thing that is so engaging about TS3 though is not its native ability to keep running forever. It's really the very nature of that much maligned and limited game engine that also keeps us happy and delighted as fun, expected, and unexpected things keep happening from one generation to the next, and nothing else I've seen (for whatever that's worth) beats the open world simulations even if they do bog down and sometimes lead to performance issues and more game file maintenance tasks.
NRaas has moved!
Our new site is at http://nraas.net
I guess I never really thought of removing the showtime venues, probably because I often use lots from Mysimrealty and such, that are combo lots with setup for performers and gigs also. I like late night gigs etc. I might try at the least getting rid of showtime parts of some venues.
As far as stuck service sims, I mean like the mailman or fire man etc. will get stuck in the black area of an apartment for some reason. I assume its NPC door related but I dunno.
And even when we do keep things at a minimum, sims still can get stuck. Especially horses in my game.
Horses are very good at getting stuck.
But I'm glad that we can talk about horses getting stuck (and NRaas fixing that), rather than wondering what TS3 would be like if it had horses. "Good as it gets" in TS3 is vastly superior to TS4. So much superior that I just uninstalled my fairly complete version of TS4. It was wasting space on my computer, nagging me to download the latest patch before it would even allow me to start the game. Enough of that nonsense.