I receive the “A serious error has occurred … restart the application” message upon trying to make any changes within the options menu in game. After first installing through Origin it would allow me to load a town as long as I did not change any options. After restarting the game to apply the changes no town will load with receiving that error message. Until I rename the The Sims 3 folder to The Sims 3 backup for a new one to be produced upon starting the game, then it will load a town to play a game again.

I will first be prompted with the message of the video card not being recognized. I definitely seem to notice my GPU working harder. I have seen the more complex way to go in and edit the files to recognize my 1080Ti but have seen it isn’t usually necessary and you can just increase settings to your GPU’s capabilities? Any response at all is so very greatly appreciated. Thank you to any of those taking the time to even read this!

Does editing the Options.ini file also produce the same error? Also, is there any chance your save folder is syncing to OneDrive? Although that shouldn't normally cause a problem with the options, OneDrive is sometimes messy with The Sims files so it could be attempting to sync something it shouldn't.

Wow. Thank you SO much. I truly didn’t think this could possibly be it. However, upon stopping syncing for Google Drive as well as removing my Documents folder from resuming syncing I am now able to successfully apply changes to the options! It’s insanely annoying that Google Drive won’t allow me to exclude one folder from the “My Documents” folder so I suppose I will have to add them all in individually aside from that one. Still cannot believe this was it. I never would’ve guessed this. Truly cannot thank you enough!

Wow, I was just going to make a post asking for help about the same problem! I got that error message again and again, even efter reinstalled the game 2 times. I will try to reinstall again now and see if this fixes the problem for me too!