Please help! I have no idea what has happened since yesterday, but I can't play. Images and sounds are soooo choppy. I've uploaded a video of the problem https://youtu.be/dPyIVR9x9pk. I haven't changed my settings or downloaded any new content since yesterday, when the game was fine. I've tried removing all cc and mods to no avail. I've also removed all my saves and unchecked interactive loading screens...

My specs are below:

Operating System
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
AMD A10-5800K 74 °C
Trinity 32nm Technology
RAM
16,0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-10-24)
Motherboard
Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. F2A75M-HD2 (P0) 40 °C
Graphics
23T71-H-AN (1768x992@30Hz)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti (PNY) 37 °C
Storage
931GB Seagate ST1000DM 003-1CH162 SATA Disk Device (SATA ) 37 °C
Optical Drives
DiscSoft Virtual SCSI CdRom Device
HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH24NS95 SATA CdRom Device
Audio
NVIDIA High Definition Audio

Can it may be: You have a Nvidia Graficcard, did you receive a Driver update?

If yes, your game settings, including the grafic settings are resetted now, to 800x600 screen size, its the options.ini
Look for more information this thread: post68618#p68618

Its because the "lastdevice" number has changed.

But maybe this is a wrong guess, let's wait for more answers.

Just to clarify things a little if I may, if you did get a graphics card driver update then it is expected that ALL of TS3's Game Options will reset to defaults -- that's resolution but also graphics quality, sound, age spans, seasons, etc. Can you check on your settings under Game Options to see if they have indeed changed?

They have not changed. The settings are as I left them yesterday, And even if they had (as I installed the game this past week), there wasn't the "static" problem with the sound and the image.

I'm afraid that your video link only shows 3 seconds of the startup screen and the only sound I hear is keyboard typing, so I was going by your text description of the issue. Is this the video you meant to link us to?

Do things improve at all if you play totally offline, meaning not logged in at the Launcher or in-game levels, and switch off the in-game TS3 store shopping experience?

I'll try and I'll definitely get better video.

Here.

https://youtu.be/bPy40tSwk9Q

And you can't see clearly, but the screen is also very choppy... where it kind of shiummers, that's not shoddy graphic settings, it's like the screen is kind of broken into little lines.

Have you taken the steps required to cap the frame rate on your Nvidia card? Usually this means by way of the Nvidia Control Panel to arrange for vertical sync and, if necessary, Nvidia Inspector (download and install required) to explicitly cap the frame rate to your monitor's refresh rate. TS3 is an older game and has no functional built-in fps limiter.

Uncapped frame rates can lead to graphics glitches, screen tears, poor game performance and lag, crashes, and left untended to can actually burn out the graphics card by making it work far too hard for no reason.

You can check on the actual frame rates you are getting in-game with ctrl+shift+C to bring up the cheats console, then type fps on (enter). As you try to play and move the game camera around, the displayed frame rate should never go above the refresh rate of your monitor. Most are 60 Hz, so that would be 60 fps, some monitors can run higher. To make the display go away, cheats console again and type fps off (enter).

I can't say for certain that what we are seeing is the result of an already damaged graphics card, but am afraid we can't yet rule that out either.

Thanks for your help. I must be one of the stupidest and most anxious members of this forum, because I took a deep breath and before I freaked out, I checked my cable and it was loose. Ooopsie. Problem solved. And now I have a FPS limiter.

Well, now I feel more than a bit silly for not even having thought of a loose monitor cable connection. Usually I find that mine either work or not, with no halfway connections in between, but I guess it depends on what kind of connections are in use -- printer port, VGA, HDMI, etc.