Thought people might find this useful if they're setting up their game, or if they want a tune-up; it also has some really useful information on alternate ways of performance improvement:



The Sims 3 | Performance & Bug Fix Guide 2018
By Anime_Boom

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfi.../?id=1131162350

Step 6 (fixing blurry tattoos and accessories is interesting), but does anyone know how this affects performance? And does it work the same as an HQ mod would?

Step 13: reading the comments for "Dead People Don't Glow", it doesn't seem to be working anymore.

Some very interesting and useful tips there, thanks for sharing. Some of it I was already familiar with, but there were some things that were new to me. How to fix bloom, for example, which has been a long term annoyance to me, if only for aesthetic reasons, but I didn't know it could contribute to lag. The lighting mod I've been using got rid of it for a while, but since I've been using a more powerful graphics card it has been back with a vengeance. Hopefully I can be rid of it for good.

EDIT: The heads up about Save Cleaner was welcome too, I've been reluctant to use it because I keep losing all my portrait paintings and photo booth pictures. Reverting to version 2.1 has cured that.

I've just tried my game with Step 6 as this was a tweak I didn't know about, and didn't notice any performance hit. Looked much better too ( the tattoos did - didn't check a sim with loads of accessories ) I use Misty's HQ + no glow mod, and I just edited it to incorporate Step6.
"dead people don't glow" seemed to stop working for a time for me as well a few months ago, but I deleted the one that was in my folder, re-downloaded and it was fine after that.
These two are vampires -



However, if you meant the download links, I can't tell sorry. I get an antivirus warning from each link, that wont even let me access the download pages anymore.

Edit - I also noticed that when my DPDG mod stopped working, I discovered it subfoldered in my Overrides folder. I generally keep that one just in my Mod folder, rather than a subfolder. I don't know if that had anything to do with it or not.

That's rather awesome. I bought a computer with an Nvidia graphics card years ago and now it's held together with duck tape and glue. And today I learned that i wasn't even using the graphics card.
Now it looks more than great! Thanks.

Good information! Thank you! Am way too tired to check things now, but will do for sure.

Thank you for this. It helped tremendously. Been wracking my brains out trying to figure out if it's my aging PC or bad CC bogging down my game. But editing the graphics rules and list has alleviated most of the lag I'm experiencing because I did upgrade my graphics card a while ago.

I probably should update my graphics card driver. It is years behind. I did an update that nuked catalyst control center and was not happy about that so restored back to before the update. I should set a backup and try again and see what happens. If you all see a fireball in space you will know it did not go well. Part of me says though, don't meddle with something that is working. If it ain't broken .........

That is a very nice guide, thanks! I did not know about some of these.

I wonder if that part with " Making Sims Able To Walk Past Each Other At Realistic Distances' affects pets as well...I really hope so.

I've never even considered changing Sim routing like that, but I've run into plenty of situations where I've had to have densely packed groups of Sims. I was recording a scene just the other day where a handful of Sims were walking into a large room, through double doors, and Laura got stuck there tapping her foot because ONE other Sim had routed through that door. Good to know!

"Step 4 - Making The Game Use More RAM"
I thought that sims 3 was unable to use more than 4gb ram?

It's unable to use more than 4 gigs (technically 3.2, but it's complicated) and it's also Large Address Aware by default. The more RAM thing is, according to everything I know, a waste of time that continues to be repeated as some sort of important solution. You can still do it if you feel like it, however, because without the LAA the game would only be able to use 2048 megabytes of RAM IIRC.

But yeah, more natural light is always better. Lighting doesn't really seem to have any sort of punch in TS3, it's an older game that predates things like HDR and PBR so there's no concept of the physical properties of light. There's no focus, no exposure, no stuff like that. Everything the game renders is within a very narrow spectrum and that means you get very dull nights and days. It's never truly bright outside, and it's never truly dark outside. This mod alleviates that somewhat by making it easier to bathe indoor spaces in natural light. Light, after all, is very powerful and can easily create a very energizing vibe.

For the record: until a couple of years ago I had no real understanding of what HDR meant or why it was important, but now that I do know I'm pretty religious about it. HDR is love, HDR is life. I've been able to emulate it somewhat with Reshade, and my Sim afternoons are blown the hell out by the overwhelming brightness of the sky. I've been known to wear sunglasses while playing TS3. Trust me, you don't want to be staring into that Sim sun for too long.

The upper limit is ~3.7 GB, not 3.2 GB.

What is being demonstrated on that guide section is not LAA, in fact it's not anything helpful at all for a couple of reasons. What is shown is the default theoretical limit for the script heap, not the total RAM that the game can use, and its default value is 20 GB, not 2 GB (count the zeros). Changing that to 40 GB or 80 GB is not going to accomplish anything useful. We don't know why 20 GB was chosen as a default value, probably an attempt to prevent the game engine from falling all over itself, but some developer somewhere along the line must have had a reason for doing so.

But you can't tell people this who insist upon perpetuating that urban legend. In my experience, most of those who should clearly already know better just won't listen.

3.7 is the maximum I've hit in gameplay, but I've found that the game engine becomes dangerously unstable above 3.1. Anything above 3.2 guarantees a crash to desktop is coming within the next minute or two so generally speaking, 3.2 is what you strictly want to keep it below. And yes, I'm talking about a game engine, not a warp engine, and if you repolarize the isolinear polaron matrix through the impulse manifold it'll still crash unceremoniously. If only it were that easy....

Besides, it feels wrong to talk about TS3's performance in a warp factor. That implies it'd be able to exceed the speed of light to begin with.

No, you have identified the danger zone for your games. Not for that of others. Who knows why, others have the same danger zone as you have reported but mine can run and be stable up through about 3.5 GB maybe a bit higher -- that's about it, though. One of my very complicated, overpopulated worlds tends to level off at 3.1 and then RAM usage very slowly increases from there; it's fine as long as I keep an eye on it throughout play. Or I may decide to switch off SP for a while (yes, I know you don't use it) so things calm down again back under 3 GB, depends on what I'm doing with the world at the time.

Oh that's good to know then, I did extensive testing on two of my PCs but they were both very similar in hardware. Those are both gone now, and my current PC has definitely exceeded my expectations on numerous occasions. Should TS3 ever get to the point again where memory usage becomes an issue (and it hasn't been for some years, thanks to me compressing my saves etc.) it will be good to know I can stop monitoring my game's EXE. I always keep Task Manager open on the secondary screen but I don't really have any need to, anymore, because I can trust the game to keep itself running without me exercising considerable restraint. On the older PCs I sometimes had to stop dead in my tracks, go to Map Mode, save the game, and wait for it to cool down a bit. I can leave it running on this PC for as much as I want to, because it simply no longer crashes through conventional means.

Also, puts on sunglasses, plays riff from Danger Zone on synthesizer

This will be helpful as I had to dump everything the other day. I just had enough of it freezing every few seconds and despite all my efforts, I could not play the game. I envy people who can get to 4 or 5 or more generations of game play. I try to use the NRAAS mods, watch what CC I put in and save with different names but still have issues. I just downloaded a small world, I'm going to limit the CC, and read this article for tips.

I only have a chipset (boo) no graphics card but the computer isn't that old and has a lot of space so we shall see.

I haven't seen this so thank you so much, Gargoyle Cat!!

Doesn't it matter what the original unit of measure is? 20,000,000 what? If it's KB, which for some reason I thought it was, then 20,000,000 is 20 GB (plus or minus for binary math). But yeah, maybe I've been miscounting the zeros all this time myself, in the other direction.

Why it's not formulated in megabytes is well beyond me.

I also have around 3.1gb of max ram usage. I can continue playing the game without issues but is unable to save after going over 3gb. I have no idea why this is, I wish I could use 3.7gb :/