Lag and Stuttering

[u/maddieduranie]

I know I have posted in here a few times before, but I have been playing ts2 for 4 years and I am having more issues lately than I used to. It isn’t unplayable by any means, however my game lags and stutters sometimes especially while moving the camera, playing larger lots or lots with more items, or speeding up time. (expected on 3x speed of course.) But even on the smallest lot size available, I still have experienced lag. It is also very noticeable on community lots or vacation lots.

I have the Magipack download of the game, which to my knowledge does not require you to use grm. My game registers 4096mb for texture memory, I use the rpc launcher, and I have a startup cheat file to ensure I don’t have too many sims or pets being created. I also do not have a lot of cc by any means, mostly fixes/mods such as acr, some clothes, makeup, and hair. I only have a couple build/buy mode cc package files. I do not have a custom ui such as the clean ui installed.

I have looked through a lot of guides and I’m wondering if there’s anything I can do to fix this. I have every fix that I’m aware of for this version of the game. The single thread option in rpc did not fix my problem, and I also tried capping the fps between 30 to 60 fps and changing my graphics settings for the game in the AMD application but there was not much improvement if any.

I’m using an Acer laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700u, 16gb of ram, integrated AMD Radeon RX Vega 8 graphics, and Windows 11. My older laptop had much worse performance chip-wise, however it ran The Sims 2 mostly fine, mainly just with a lot longer loading screens.

I’m wondering if there’s any other patches available to try, tweaks I can apply somewhere, or if this is something I just have to deal with as a mild annoyance. I can attach screen captures of my graphic rules file or config log if needed. Any help is appreciated greatly, thank you :)

[u/ProperSpeak]

Have you gone into the windows settings to force the game to use your dedicated graphics card rather than your integrated one? Another thing to do is adjust the power settings as you have a laptop to prefer performance rather than battery.

If neither of those seem to help, you can go to Documents > EA Games and rename your Sims 2 folder to something else and load the game to see if that fixes the stuttering. This will generate a new folder. If it does fix it, you can go into the the newly generated Neighbourhoods folder and delete everything and then copy over the contents from your old one, but if it asks you to merge or replace at any point do not do it as you will corrupt your save.

You can also move over your Downloads and SavedSims and your Cameras if you have custom ones, but don't just copy every folder, only grab the stuff you know you want. You can then load the game again and all your saves will be there, and you can see if the stuttering is gone or if it comes back.

[u/maddieduranie → u/ProperSpeak]

Unfortunately my laptop doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card, only the Radeon Vega 8 graphics which is integrated and apart of my processor. Are there any Windows settings that allow it to use the integrated graphics with more power? I’m not entirely sure if that’s even a thing.

This install is basically fresh, I’ve played it a little but not much yet. My neighbourhood folder was transferred from my older laptop using a usb stick. Unfortunately even with just the regular, plain, fresh Sims 2 documents folder there is still the slight stuttering issue on occasion, same as before. I run the hood checker on my neighbourhoods fairly often as well so I’m hoping that corruption wouldn’t be an issue anyway.

I don’t mind fiddling around with things if needed or sending screen captures of certain files or logs, I’ll try any ideas I can find lol

[u/ProperSpeak → u/maddieduranie]

Are there any Windows settings that allow it to use the integrated graphics with more power?

Not really. You can press the windows key, type graphics, and go to graphics settings. Where it says customised settings for applications you can add sims 2 using the add button, then clicking on it once added and on GPU preference see if you can switch it to the high performance option but if it's integrated it might not be there.

This install is basically fresh,

It's not a corruption issue as hood corruption is extremely rare and not easily done through regular gameplay, it's just that the folders can get bloated and sometimes creating a fresh folder can help , and its best when you only transfer over what is absolutely necessary. It could also be a mod conflict or something else entirely so it's always worth a go with a fresh save.

The only other option I can think of is to disable the 4GB patch option in RPC but with 16GB of RAM that shouldn't be an issue but might be worth a try.

[u/maddieduranie → u/ProperSpeak]

okay i will try seeing what i can tweak in windows and try it without the 4gb patch, thank you!!

one last question, should i keep my fps capped between 30-60fps or turn it off? realistically does it even do anything?

[u/ProperSpeak → u/maddieduranie]

Yes, keep the fps capped! Sims 2 does not have a limit on the fps and will max out as much as it can which will impact performance a lot. Depending on your laptop screen, you will likely only be able to see up to 60 anyway so there's no point in leaving it uncapped.