Hi there, long time lurker here. I'm experiencing an issue with the Ultimate Collection and I tried everything I could to fix it, but nothing has worked so far.

The problem: the game lags a lot when there are sims in view. Even if there are 10 sims on the lot the problem goes away when I move the camera away from them, so it happens ONLY when I look at them.
This makes going on community lots impossible, or even having big families or invite guests over. My pc is really good for the sims 2, and I can run the sims 4 on maxed settings without a problem, so the graphics or CC are really not the issue here.

What I tried:
-Applied the 4GB patch and made sure it's working (following the Jessa video step by step)
-Ran graphic rules maker and added my graphic card to the database (I attached my graphic rules.sgr file, I would be super grateful if you could check it out)
-Removed the Sims 2 Ultimate Collection Documents folder to generate new saves, no CC
-Reinstall everything multiple times
-Lower the graphics to the minimum
-Run the game in windowed/fullscreen resolution
-Added "-CPUCount:1" to the game details
-Set Affinity via Task Manager (Untick all CPUs except CPU 0)

Nothing had any effect on this issue.

I had the same issue with a cracked version, right now I'm trying with the official up to date Origin Ultimate Collection. SecuROM has been removed a while ago, so the fixes for it are outaded.

My specs:
OS: Windows 10 pro 64 bit
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) 15-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz (6 CPUs), ~2.8GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM
GPU: GeForce GTX 1660 Ti

Please someone help me and let me know if I forgot anything!

Maybe they're using very high-poly cc? It might be problem even for beefy PCs sometimes.

As I already stated in my main post I already removed my entire Documents folder to make sure I create a new save with no CC at all. I tried to send some sims in a community lot and it lagged like always... the more the sims, the worse the lag.
Plus, 99% of the CC I have in my folder (now located elsewhere since I'm trying to figure out a solution without CC) is the same I had in 2011 on my old laptop that didn't affect the performance at all, apart from slowing down loading times like any CC would do.
I always make sure the CC I download is low poly and I rename the files replacing all special characters (!,.[]+- etc) with underscores to make them better readable by the game.

I'm going to update the main post to add other things I tried to fix this issue (that unfortunately didn't work)

If I had to bet, I'd bet that it's your processor that's causing the problem. TS2 is a 15-year-old game. Multicore processors did not exist then, and TS2 doesn't know how to "talk" to them properly. This can sometimes cause lag when playing on machines with such processors. Whether or not it does depends on the processor.

There is a way you can set things up so that the game only uses one of your processor's cores. If this is what is causing your problem, it should fix it. I don't know how to do this personally and I don't have time to find you a direct link right now, but I believe the info on how to do it (if you don't know how yourself) is on the Leefish boards.

I figured this would be the case, but even adding "-CPUCount:1" had no effect on the performance. I also tried ticking just the "CPU 0" via task manager, but it didn't help.
Thank you for the replies guys, I really appreciate it, I will keep trying to fix it, I don't want to give up TS2 yet!

If anything else comes to mind please share I wanna try everything.

Still trying to figure this out, anyone has any idea what else could I try?