This fixed all my issues. Sims 2 booted up with no problems (or the hideous lag I was getting where it'd eat up all my VRAM and RAM before launching)! I'm overjoyed to be able to play this game again!

OS: Windows 10 Pro 1903
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
GPU: AMD Radeon VII

Awesome! Great to hear! Added to the trophy case.

Decided to give it a go (and found a way around Origin at the same time, because Origin *grr*). So far so good, the game starts up and loaded in maybe a minute.

So far (in my New game with very limited CC) no pink-soup on arrival, no pink on lot, shaders work nicely, no crashing, and fast loading. I can even go back to the neighborhood without getting any pink, CAS seems to be pink-free too, and was able to load a previously not loaded neighborhood. Still no pink! And yes - that really was on the first try

For everything I previously tried, I got as far as to no pink on the first lot, and usually back to pink-flashing if I went back to the neighborhood, so at the very least it is a welcome improvemement, and at best *crosses fingers* I may be lucky enough to get no pink *crosses fingers very hard*, or just the occasional pink at high loads (because that's what I usually got with my old simming computer, and I can learn to live with that).

Still have some stress-testing left (haven't tried with my semi-full game yet), but so far it does look promising.

EDIT: Loading to neighborhood selector took roughly 40 or so minutes (beating the old one with at least 20-40 minutes, possibly more), so far no crashes.
And... GASP!!! IT LOADED MY STORYHOOD in less than 5 minutes and NO PINK!!!!! *insert jawdrop here* :lovestruc (Now, THAT's something I didn't expect! Not even my old laptop wanted to touch that thing with a twenty meter pole, always crashing on loading, and I got a DXdirect error before trying this fix)
*Dances around happily* Alright, calm down, take a deep breath, still haven't tried loading a lot yet...
*loads up mid-range lot, just to give it a go*
*nervously checking the screen for anything beyond the first 4 "lights" on the lot/family loading screen*
Aaaand crash. Got a bit too hopeful, I guess. (can the crash log be of help?)

But at least there's a genuine hope for a working game, right? My storyhood is most likely already borkified, and it did come from a CD install, so I'm not entirely sure if there are some strange things going on (I've modified some of the CC, probably removed some too, and I no longer have the lighting mod and probably not the camera fix I used to have - could be some sort of CC issue for all I know). I've been planning to do a bit of cleaning, possibly even a complete reworking of the neighborhood, so perhaps it's about time...

Questions:
I noticed the note about disabling/removing the memory allocation fix. I still have it running (I think?) but I take it this should be safe to turn off?

Are there any rough limits on where people start to see pink-flashing (the high-load kind, not the startup soup kind) with this fix? I've managed to shrink my downloads down to roughly 20 GB and probably could manage to weed out some more items, but it would be nice to have a rough idea on where to draw the line.
(There is already a bit less CC than my old computer had to deal with (I think?), and there I only got occasional pink with snow/weather and on heavy lots, or after playing for a very long while - basically, I knew when to expect it in most cases. There was only one occasion of pink-soup on arrival, and I fixed it with a backup, because I kinda panicked).

Is it normal for the Config log to say "GeForce 7800 GTX" when I have a GTX 1070? (Yes, already added it to the Video card file)

@simmer22 It is normal. D9VK will identify to the game as a Geforce 7800 GTX. This is to ensure people with AMD or Intel cards have the same "hacks" TS2 applies to its rendering for Nvidia so the DXVK/D9VK dev only has to consider and validate one set of behaviors.

As for upper limit, the nature of D9VK necessitates 2 copies of the texture in memory (DX9 and Vulkan). This means the texture load is about doubled unfortunately. There may or may not be a solution in the future for that as some other more mod-heavy games are also hitting this.

As for rough limit, it's hard to say. Mods come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. It's possible to add to dxvk.conf "dxvk.hud = memory" to show a HUD to track memory usage from D9VK's side.

I just reset my password for this website which I haven't used since 2015 just to say how grateful I am for this thread. I wouldn't have found it had I not searched specifically for the error code I was getting.

This fixed my crashing issues with my Ryzen 5 3600X and my RX 5700XT. I couldn't even launch the game, but now I'm playing away in beautiful 1440p. Thanks for your help crazysim.

Dug up my login to say:

I was one of the people trying very hard to help solve 'flashing pink' when it began to spread for users of NVIDIA series 10 cards and newer major Windows 10 updates, although I was mostly over on leefish:

http://www.leefish.nl/mybb/showthread.php?tid=8257

Even then, I was mostly just providing a lot of hardware test data, because I had access to a lot of stuff. I didn't/don't have the background knowledge of GPUs to contribute meaningfully.

For a while I worked around it by not letting Windows upgrade to the next major patch; then I worked around it by downgrading to a GTX970. But eventually I mostly gave up, especially because I didn't like having to sit through ten-minute YouTube videos to get to the alleged fixes. And I didn't want to have to hang on to an outdated GPU. So I've been playing WoW. :/

So every few months I check back here to see if anyone made any headway. And YESSS, finally!

Haven't tried it yet but it looks much more promising than anything I've seen since this started happening.

Thank you, @crazysim.

Edit for trophy case:

Windows 10 Pro 1903
i7 6700K
32 GB RAM
GTX 1070, current drivers
TS2 UC
Followed instructions as written, used Graphics Rules Maker
Logged in, Sim shadows looked like water; did some hunting, removed "simNopke-simShadowFix", shadows are now normal
Let a large tacky lot with lots of mirrors and water and 8 family members run on its own while I went to lunch
No crashes, no pink.

@cataplasia Awesome! I'm surprised the RX 5700XT can't even launch the game at all. Support is getting bad. Good thing there's this though. I'm curious, what was the "error code" you were getting? I'm always curious about the needles people throw into the search engine to get to here.

@gwynne Awesome! If you're up for it, could you bump your thread on Leefish? Also, I added your entry to the trophy case.

Yep done!

Has anyone here tried VirtualBox? I am going to try it tomorrow since I can only get this D9VK to work in Window mod but I hate no edge scrolling. Virtual box is said to allow edge scrolling and works on every platform. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox I read about it on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/baldursgat...edge_scrolling/

I am one of the few people on Win 7 (a new this year win 7) with horrible pink flashing. My old win 7 never had this issue, so it's not windows causing it but something else.

Hi Jo,

I'm shocked that the game is giving you pink soup on Win 7. I agree that it's not the OS, but something else that is causing the pink goop. Have you by chance recently upgraded any graphic card drivers? If so, maybe try downgrading the drivers a version or two; or maybe install an old graphic card you had. I'm sorry that you're having so much trouble with this.

Darn, I've now noted the no edge scrolling issue in the guide. There's a cruel choice between edge scrolling or alt-tabbing.

Absolutely!

I was getting an ACCESS_VIOLATION error, with the following exception module:


So I typed this into Google:

And this thread came up: https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=633748

Which pointed me in the direction of your thread!

I would just like to add as well, while this did fix my issues with crashing on launch, I started to have issues with crashing on loading neighbourhood, no matter which neighbourhood I chose. It turned out to be the Razer Cortex software that I was running - how bizarre! I only managed to figure that one out when I opened Task Manager during a crash and expanded the TS2 exe (which said not responding) and saw an instance of Razer Cortex within it. Having killed Razer Cortex before launch the next time, the game worked flawlessly (and still is now).

Thanks very much for your help.

What's that that you're talking about?

I've noticed a persistent issue wherein I can't alt tab either, though I have edge scrolling disabled anyway (hate the damn thing).

I do have a workaround, and it involves using Windows 10 "multi-desktop" feature. Press Windows key + tab and then "New Desktop" at the top of the overlay that comes up. This'll bring you to a whole new desktop. Just press windows key + tab again to select the desktop with Sims on and you'll return to the game.

Alt-Tab doesn't work in D9VK with native fullscreen. Another workaround for that is to use something like fullscreenizer on Sims 2 running in Windowed mode which I mentioned in the guide.

But that multi-desktop feature should be pretty helpful as an additional workaround. I'll suggest it to that person in the Discord who brought this up.

Unfortunately, @joandsarah77 was running Win 7. I didn't notice that. Oh well, at least there's WASD. It's something at least.

I've been told on Discord that the two don't work together, so never mind. I will have to learn how to use the a,s,d keys. I was told about those last night, which is certainly a lot better than reaching over to the arrow pad. I have added fullscreenizer but this does not add edge scrolling or fix how small my UI is now. It's nice to have the white border gone though.

My set up is an oddity. Not only do I have win 7 on a new pc (Maybe the other newer hardware doesn't like it? I don't know.) I also play on a square monitor-by choice. Dell still makes square monitors and my eyes I prefer it but this means I can't use anything designed for wide screens.

I will keep playing and see how it goes for the pink flashing, see if I need to lower the texture memory more. I have my graphic rules set only on 1024MB right now.

I am on
Windows 7profesional 64 bit
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
processor Intel(R)Core(TM) i5-7600k CPU 3.80GHz (4CPUs)
3276MB RAM

I can say that the pink flashing is way less but I did get some in 3 sims thumbnails and after trying a few things without clearing it I had to reset the 3 of them by deleting them off the lot and reloading the lot. This particular family is glitchy though. I do have some hood corruption which I mop up, so that may also play into it?

@monijt1 if you want to see something really wild click on Jessa's sticky thread here on help and go to page 3, post #56. Thing of nightmares on an AMD card.
http://modthesims.info/showthread.p...542#post5378542

Some interesting developments have happened since this post. I worked with Tannis Root (the other person mentioned in the Success Trophy Case) to get a save from someone with heavy amounts of CC to his Sims 2 on Linux running computer.

No pink. No crash. On Linux. While on my Sims 2 on Windows computer with D9VK, eventual pink, and crash. Stock or near stock Sims 2 seems to be re-enabled by D9VK to work but ultra heavy CC seems to eventually still crap out.

We tried helping someone out in the channel to dual boot Linux as well. So far no pink no crash either. Hmm!

@simmer22, if you're interested getting Sims 2 with lots of CC working on your hardware by the way of dual booting Linux, could you reach out to "@Tannis Root#9720" in the #sims-2-help channel on the Pleasant Sims Discord. https://discord.gg/7ADzNnE

Tannis Root is more than happy to help.

FYI @child_of_air @xRedcrossx @oOLampiOo ^

I guess the offer is the same too. You three are the only current ones in the failure cardboard box due to really heavy CC use. Anyway, best of luck!

Now that's interesting! Thank you for reporting back! I've been wanting to try out Linux for a while, but thought it might require some time to get into it and didn't really have that time. Might try a dual boot tho, as soon as this super stressful phase at university is over. Thank you!

Some user in the PleasantSims Discord also ran into the Razer Cortex issue. While I added it to the guide, the user didn't catch it. Luckily, I mentioned it alongside the "Are you running Antivirus" question and the user said they were running it. Disabling Razer Cortex fixed the issue.

Thanks for reporting this. You saved another user many more hours and your report rescued another Sims 2 installation.

I'd like to say that this guide made my Sims 2 go from crashing on launch with a the application has crashed error to working flawlessly on my Windows 10 installation with a AMD Radeon RX 5700 video card and AMD Ryzen 3700X processor. I feel like I should mention that Graphics Rules Maker did not work on my computer. It deleted my video files instead of editing them, so I had to get the correct files from Leefish.

Oof that is weird! I utilized Graphics Rule Maker as a step so that I did not have to explain another sequence of copying files or worse, editing text files. If you could, I think the Graphics Rule Maker people would like to hear about that. They have a Discord linked on their page.

The Graphics Rules Maker is a bit hit-and-miss. I know I had some issues with it at one point, (possibly when I was trying to properly add my Nvidia card to the VideoCards file on my old laptop - after a few years of no issues, the card would at random not recognize my TS2 game. The GRM didn't work, and manually editing also didn't work, so after a lot of trial and failure I figured I had to manually set the Nvidia card as the main card whenever I wanted to play - anything else didn't work). It did seem to work fine on my new laptop, though.

D9VK has been merged into DXVK. DXVK did not have DirectX 9 support. Now it does! have I'm editing the guide, posts, and forum thread title to reflect that.

In addition, some bugs have been fixed. For example, snow roofs in the neighborhood view are now rendered correctly. Snow shows! Things like this require vigilance to see. If you see something different from native Microsoft DirectX 9, please be sure to mention it!

Unfortunately, DXVK 1.5 doesn't work with Sims 2 even though it clearly has the D9VK innards merged. Something is really broken here. I should have tested it first but it looks like I jumped the gun.

I've reverted the title of this thread to D9VK and have reverted the releases link in the guide to D9VK. Unfortunately, there's a lot of DXVK changed in the document so I'm leaving them.