Hello fellow simmers let me tell you my story

I used to play the sims 3 on this old compuer of mine, it had an intel integrated graphic card, and for some reason the sims 3 ran just fine, sometimes a bit laggy but was very playable on windows 7. Then I updated my computer to windows 10 and the game became unplayable, it was very laggy, no change in hardware, just the OS update made it laggy.

Now I bought a dedicated graphic card, as it says in the title it's a GTX 1050ti, but the game still runs like trash, and there are a lot of visual glitches. I've changed the graphic rules.sgr but still it feels like i'm playin it on a potato. Any idea what it could be, because I was able to play this game decently before, and now for some reasons I can't

Moved to the Help forums!

Most any of the modern graphics cards will run wild on frame rates (fps) unless they are capped, including the GTX 1050Ti. Have you taken the steps to cap its frame rate for TS3 within the Nvidia Control Panel (vsync, only works in Full Screen Mode if it works at all) or Nvidia Inspector (works in both Full Screen and Windowed modes and much more reliably)? Unlike more recently released games, TS3 does not have a built-in frame rate limiter. Left uncapped, the excess fps are digital noise and can cause lag, graphics glitches, screen tears, crashing, and can even ultimately damage the card and your system board.

To check on actual fps rates in-game unless you have another means to do so, ctrl + shift + C to bring up the cheats console and fps on (enter). As you play and move the game camera around, the displayed fps rate should never go far above the refresh rate of your monitor, which is usually 60 Hz (so 60 fps). Some monitors do have higher refresh rates though. To turn the display back off, cheats console again and fps off (enter).

The executable to cap in any of the programs that do this would be TS3.exe for Patch 1.69 and TS3w.exe (with the "w") for 1.67 and below.

As for Win 10, you do need to make sure that your graphics drivers are updated and for the correct OS. That's not likely to happen by itself during an OS in-place upgrade.

I checked the fps and they stay at 60 all time, never go beyond that, so I think that's not a issue

Here are some issues:

This is the town view http://i.imgur.com/9H3qGhw.png
I can't see anything, just blue

Then when I go to create a sim http://i.imgur.com/NwiQcba.png
The sim looks stretched

And this is how it looks ingame.http://i.imgur.com/ZRjI81h.png
I can see everything, it's stretchy and laggy.

Then I went to options and tried to change graphic setting, when I hit "apply changes" the game stops responding.

I already updated the drivers

It might not be this simple, but it looks like you working with a resolution that your monitor cannot support. If you cannot change graphics settings in Game Options, does it help if you reset them? Pull the file called Options.ini out of your TS3 user game folder, that should set everything back to defaults or what the game thinks are the defaults on the next launch.

And if that doesn't do it, perhaps we need to see what your DeviceConfig.log looks like (the first 40 lines or so, before it gets to the long list of game options).

I removed Options.ini from the forlder but nothing changed, the game looked the same, I also tried playing the game in windowed mode, same results.

As for the DeviceConfig.log



This is the only thing in this archive, which I think is weird

Yeah, "weird" is one word for it!

Ok, if you rename your Documents sims 3 folder to something like Sims 3 old, and then run the game to create a new one, does that DeviceConfig.log look the same?

it looks like the settings determines widescreen soluthion while it's actually displayed as 4/3 . The "weird" is maybe not very productive word, but quite valid in such case. I've had such problems in the opposite way, but not like that.

OK. Maybe it's something connected with W10 thingies? DeviceConfig shouldn't be empty, at last there should be some universal garbage. Maybe the game is directed by the system to actually write on the cloud drive, not locally and then things goes "weird"? Disable the OneDrive and try again, please (it wouldn't hurt to try, anyway).

I tried renaming the sims folder in documents so it generates a new one, but it didn't work, the file is still empty. I've been watching some youtube tutorials to fix this issue, and it happened to several people. Someone said to run dxdiag to fix it but it wasnt fixed in my case :/



I have a "weird" monitor, well, actually it's a small tv that that works like a monitor, but it has problems with reslutions sometimes, but i can run games fine, I usually play Overwatch and Cities Skylines without any problem

My OneDrive is disabled, it was the first thing I did when I installed W10, mostly because my internet connection is not good so the last thing I need is one drive eating my bandwidth

I think that shouldn't be the cause of the problem, I think the problem is why your DeviceConfig is empty? That means.. not only TS3 didn't recognize your GTX1050Ti but TS3 can't even access what devices were registered in your Windows registry. Now the question is.. does your W10 recognizes all devices you have in your system?

To check that, go to your Device Manager and see if W10 does recognizes your GTX1050Ti, and secondly, when you install/update your Nvidia drivers, have you install the Net3FX for W10? Because Nvidia drivers needs the Net3FX installed to run properly for Win 10, go here for more details.

Note: I think your FPS stays at 60 was because of your empty DeviceConfig, not because you have FPS limiter or Nvidia Inspector installed and capping your TS3 FPS, once you fix your empty DeviceConfig, you need FPS Limiter or Nvidia Inspector capping TS3 FPS to protect your GTX1050Ti from damage.

Can we back up a tad bit? I want to tackle potential hardware issues before going to troubleshoot software.
Is this an

1. in-place win 10 update, via Windows Update, with a-pre-Win 10 install of Sims 3 or
2. a new fresh install of Windows 10 and also fresh install of Sims 3?

Just the GPU is new? What Motherboard, CPU, RAM and PSU do you have? Your prevous setup is the same Motherboard, CPU, RAM and PSU, only with an onboard graphics? With the new GPU hardware in, is the onboard disabled in the BIOS, or you have explicitly indicated to the system the TS3 should always use the dedicated GPU instead of the onboard? And of course have run Windows updates post-install, and updated Nvidia drivers prior to running Sims 3? Not to mention, already have setup TS3 to recognize the new GPU (you've mentioned graphic rules.sgr, but not the other, so I wanted to confirm)?

No issues with computer otherwise? When watching Youtube or movies or playing other games? Incidentally, what other games have you run (if you have other games) on this machine post-win-10 install?