I've added tons of CC deco clutter to certain lots, but those Sim households are very prone to pink flashing.

So I wonder, do you experience smooth gameplay with a Sims household living in a CC-heavy cluttered lot? Do you notice differences with the lot size despite roughly the same amount of CC objects?

On my old computer I cluttered quite a bit - not to the extreme, but enough so the spaces looked lived-in. I usually make sure to keep open spaces where sims are supposed to walk, sit and lie down, so they won't complain (or at least to minimize the complaints). I take pictures mostly, so some of the cluttering often happen while I'm working on a picture.

I usually didn't have too many issues with lagging and pink-flashing, and made sure to do things to prevent that if I played on the more CC-heavy lots (I had a couple hospitals and such that would very often send my game into pink-flashing after a while). Lot size (mostly house/building size and stuff around it) and amount of clutter did matter, as did number of sims. I would notice a bit of lag with the heaviest lots and if there were a lot of sims, but after a while I knew my game's rough spots, so I had all of it almost down to a science, knowing what I could do, when, and when not. I usually did the heavier lots at the end of a photo session, trying to get everything done as fast as possible, so if the game started going pink I didn't have to spend over an hour loading my game again.

Haven't done any heavy CC-testing on my new laptop so don't know how it reacts, but had some major pink-flashy issues in the beginning, so had to sort out that first. Also editing my CC a bit, to make it easier to decorate with.

@simmer22 I managed to make some recent screenshots of the pink-flash prone household. In three rooms, I've cluttered up multiple bookshelves: https://imgur.com/a/xzP9lgx
Has anyone experienced a no-crash gameplay with this much clutter in a household?
And what's a reasonable polycount-to-size ratio? I assume the texture size of deco is usually no more than 512 x 512.

Well, so much depends on the computer you've got and the conditions you're using it in. Everybody has to experiment to find their own sweet up and it'll change with every computer.

@Peni Griffin I run the game on NVIDIA GTX 1650 and applied all the important memory settings (4 GB patch, memory allocation fix, checkboxes in GRM suited for NVIDIA), but I'm still playing around with the texture memory value. It must be said that the memory-problematic household consists of five Sims + two Pets who live in a large lot.

What is your sweet spot based on your specs?

I agree with Peni. It also depends on the items - high-poly items with large textures are usually worse than low-poly items with smaller textures. Several of the items you've got there look like they could be of the low-poly variety, possibly repo'd, but it's difficult to say.

I've had way worse cluttering in some lots, on my old computer. I think the older hardware handled the game a bit better, because except for loading times, the game usually worked quite nicely. The main thing my game seemed to have issues with was snow, which would pretty much always cause pink-flashing after a while. I turned off weather with a mod, and after that the pink-flashing rarely appeared elsewhere than the heaviest lots after a very long time of playing (we're talking 2-3 days of continuous runtime, though with lot shifts).

But all computers and setups are going to be different, so it's comparing apples to watermelons - unless you have the exact computer setup, game and graphic setup, piece of CC, lot, etc. as another person, there will always be differences in how the game handles things (and even then it's not certain you get the same result). Some people get pink-flashing when they barely have any CC, others don't even get it when they're running super-cluttered lots with tons of sims, even if their setup seem to be somewhat similar, and with no good explanation as to why.

I have no clue what my sweet spot would be, because I only get pink flashing when the game's about to crash due to overheating. I'm running the game on a Windows 7 machine, and I don't think pink flashing became a huge issue until people started running Windows 10; one reason why I went out of my way to get a Windows 7 machine.

I've still not even come close to what my limit might be as I've played some very object heavy apartment lots on my almost ten year old Windows 7 laptop and I only recently had overheating when my old cooling pad wore out and have to buy a new one.I'm likley one of those rare exceptions and I run at least a few different programs to manae backgound tasks and shut that down to a minimum and even have mode managers to switch modes on my computer which has been the case for almost all of the time I owned and used it.

I have Windows 10 and I do not get pink flashing The pc is getting a bit old-fashioned now, though.
My thoughts on this is that it may rather be the kind of cc than the amount of cc - some cc have very high polygons, some are not that well made and some are harder on your pc than others.
It makes sense to me that 20 low polygon hairs/objects will be less of a strain than 20 high polygon hairs/objects.

I live in a very cluttered and messy house, because over the years we've accumulated too much stuff. I occasionally have "routing difficulties" getting to things and often have difficulties finding things. Perhaps in reaction to this my Sims tend to go for a minimalist approach. They tend to have what they need in their houses and not much beside. In fact my best Sim friend Andrew is a real neatnik. He's an unreconstructed Virgo, and he'd go berserk if he could see my Real Life house. ("I don't know how you can live in this mess!")

I too have a NVIDIA GTX 1650 graphics card. It's the one that came with the Dell gaming laptop that I got in the autumn of 2020. My graphics rules are as recommended to me by various people here. I especially remember omglo and simsample helping me, but there were other people too. I don't use the 4Gb patch because, to be honest, I haven't needed it yet. I now have over 2Gb in my Downloads folder, so I may need it yet. I've never seen pink flashing in my game. (Touch wood!!) My biggest weaknesses for CC are clothes and hair, but the clothes my Sims like are also minimalist (i.e. barely there!) and tend not to be high poly. I have a lot of male hair in emo/yaoi styles similar to Andrew's and Julian's. For females I like hair similar in style, but perhaps a little longer. AFAIK this sort of hair really isn't usually very high poly either. Fortunately I really don't go for the sort of big female hair that I believe can cause problems. In fact the only CC I ever downloaded that really caused a poly problem was a boa for adult male Sims (Don't ask!!) that I downloaded from TheNinthWaveSims (aka joninmobile -- btw does anyone know why he's banned here?). When I put that in my Downloads folder, my poor old Packard Bell netbook, with its onboard Intel graphics, threw up up its little electronic hands in horror and said, "No!!!!!!!!!" I haven't tried installing it since -- not even on my new gaming computer. Actually I think the most cluttered houses in my game belong to some of the pre-mades, like the Summerdreams and Malcolm Landgraab IV, but that's nearly all Maxis stuff -- there is very little CC in their houses (except perhaps inside their wardrobes).

So, I don't have a problem with pink flashing, but then I really don't go for big lots cluttered with CC. In fact I seldom go for big lots at all. 3x3 is my normal maximum -- at least for lots I build myself. More often it's 3x2 or 2x2. I do have some bigger lots like the Veronaville Swim Centre (the very first lot that I made), but the centre of that is filled by a huge swimming pool, so not much room for clutter! By the way I have Windows 10 on my gaming laptop, and have Windows 7 on my old netbook (which I no longer regularly use for Simming).

On my old computer I rarely got any pink-flashing unless I had past 25-30 GB of CC (not 100% certain of the accurate count, because I used to keep some non-package files in there), and even then it was pretty rare (snow and very heavy lots).

My new computer had pink-soup for a while, but it was caused by some GraphicRulesMaker borkage (which is now fixed), and haven't seen any pink since. I haven't tested with much CC yet, but I think I've tried around 3-5 GB and doesn't seem like it has any issues with that, at least for short-time play (loads fast, and no apparent ingame lag). I have had some crashing issues, though - but it's very random and doesn't seem CC-related - not sure if it's due to not having removed the DXVK properly or some such (that thing only caused more crashing for me). Could be memory-related (Win10 is a pain...).

In many cases, your lot crashs. That happened to me with my old heavily cluttered lot just because they have wrong cc inside . In addition, your sims cannot move on correctly , they are always whinning they can't use chairs, tables etc. I also got issues with few cluttered neighbohood. Better stay clean in this game, if you want a wise advice.

I do experience in my sims's home business. It's a vinyl store, a coffee shop on ground floor and a home on the upper floor + backyard + me being extra with cc. The only thing that keeps it from crashing is that it's not particularly big, everything is happening on a 2x3 lot. When the pink stuff happens, I just minimize the game and go back. If that doesn't work I exit the family, enter another one and go back. easy-peasy

On my old computer Win 7, 3GB ram, 32bit heavily cluttered lots with a lot of CC worked like a charm. It was extremely smooth. Weirdly, when the same computer had Win XP, there were crashes and purple stuff as if those were different computers. I feel like the first specs are the best for TS2.
Now that I have an 8GB ram, Win 10, 64bit laptop, I experience plenty of graphic issues because apparently the game is too weak for newer machines and constantly needs some mods and patches to work.