Flickering Screen

Mr_Deacon

It's been a while since I've played Sims 3, but today when I launched the game, the screen keeps flickering, which pretty much makes the game unplayable.

I've never had a problem like this before. Anybody else have this issue?

puzzlezaddict

Do you have an fps limiter in place? The first thing to check is your in-game frame rates. Bring up the cheats console (crtl-shift-c) and enter "fps on" without quotes, and a number will appear in the upper right corner of the screen. ("fps off" makes it go away.) Your fps should never go above the refresh rate of your monitor, which is usually 60 Hz. If you're seeing high numbers or a lot of fluctuation, it's a good idea to use an fps limiter to lock in the frame rates. That could fix the flickering, as well as protecting your graphics card.

A couple of other questions: Does the flickering go away in windowed mode (or fullscreen if you're playing in windowed)? Do you have any video capture tool running while you play? And what do you have for a graphics card? Which tool(s) you use will depend on its manufacturer.

If you don't know what card you have, or you want to be thorough, you can run a dxdiag and post the results in pastebin.com or some other (free) filesharing site. Then you can leave the link here, and people here can check for a whole range of potential issues.

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

Mr_Deacon

puzzlezaddict wrote: »

Do you have an fps limiter in place? The first thing to check is your in-game frame rates. Bring up the cheats console (crtl-shift-c) and enter "fps on" without quotes, and a number will appear in the upper right corner of the screen. ("fps off" makes it go away.) Your fps should never go above the refresh rate of your monitor, which is usually 60 Hz. If you're seeing high numbers or a lot of fluctuation, it's a good idea to use an fps limiter to lock in the frame rates. That could fix the flickering, as well as protecting your graphics card.

A couple of other questions: Does the flickering go away in windowed mode (or fullscreen if you're playing in windowed)? Do you have any video capture tool running while you play? And what do you have for a graphics card? Which tool(s) you use will depend on its manufacturer.

If you don't know what card you have, or you want to be thorough, you can run a dxdiag and post the results in pastebin.com or some other (free) filesharing site. Then you can leave the link here, and people here can check for a whole range of potential issues.

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

The issue resolves when I disable full-screen mode.

I will try your other suggestions. Thanks for answering. It's good to know there are still folks out there playing SIMS 3,