Best modules and config to avoid lag?

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Alerie
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Best modules and config to avoid lag?

Post by Alerie » December 6th, 2018, 8:20 am

Hello! First I would like to say thanks for the wonderful work put on this mods, they've really improved my Sims 3 gameplay.

I've been using Nraas mods for some time now, but even with them on my Sims 3 lags a lot.
I use Decensor, ErrorTrap, MasterController, Overwatch, Relativity and StoryProgression (and some SP modules: Career, Extra, Lovers, Others, Population, Relationship, Skill, Meanies, CopsAndRobbers), and I just learned today that StoryProgression does add lag to the game (I thought it helped with lag and performance too), and the only configuration I tweaked was turning off notifications, so I just let SP run on it's own. I have a high-end computer, so I was worried and confused as to why my game lags so hard even with my specs and Nraas mods (I also have Ellacharmed's world fixes, and few custom content, just 15~20 hairstyles). Oh, and my game is installed on a SSD.

So I came here for help. To improve my game's lag and performance, should I just run SP alone? Which modules may cause more lag? Also, is there anything I can configure in SP options to help with my lag? While investigating I read something about lowering SP's speed, but nothing else.

Here are my specs, just in case:
i7-6700K 4.00GHz
16GM RAM
Geforce RTX 2070
Windows 10 Pro 64 Bits

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igazor
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Best modules and config to avoid lag?

Post by igazor » December 6th, 2018, 9:55 am

Hi there. The first thing I have to ask is have you taken the steps required to arrange vertical sync and cap the frame rate on that RTX 2070 card? TS3 has no functional fps limiter. To check the fps rates you are getting in game, ctrl+shift+C to bring up the cheats console and type fps on (enter). As you play and move the game camera around, the displayed rate should never exceed the refresh rate of your monitor. Most are 60 Hz, so the goal is 60 fps, but some can run higher. To make the display go away, cheats console again and fps off (enter). The usual tool to try first is the Nvidia Control Panel with a profile for TS3.exe for Patch 1.69 or TS3w.exe (with the "w") for 1.67. If that doesn't lock things in or if windowed mode is required, then we move on to Nvidia Inspector to cap the frame rate with an explicit value.

Just to point out, most of the mods in this collection are designed to improve performance. StoryProgression is not, that one adds to the overhead of the game noticeably but it becomes a tradeoff as to how we manage its features vs. the impact we get of that one always running and pushing inactive sims around. We can talk about other ways to scale back SP's impact, but let's address the fps thing first if we could and then we would also want to know which world(s) you are playing and how high their resident populations are. On City Hall or an in-game computer, NRaas > MC > Demographics > Population > "X" to dismiss the filter. The numbers of homeless and service may be interesting, but it's really the number of residents reported that is important here.

If you are playing strictly in Isla Paradiso or Bridgeport, or a world that is really too large for the game engine to manage properly, then we need to have a different conversation.  :|

Also if you could, please describe the lag you are getting. Are we talking about occasional game camera stutter, slowness of scenes to render fully, or is it more like the game clock keep freezing for real time minutes while the animations continue, then jerks forward and stalls again repeatedly thus making proper gameplay less possible?

And finally we offer this page, in case you are not familiar with it.
TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE

Alerie
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Best modules and config to avoid lag?

Post by Alerie » December 6th, 2018, 1:36 pm

Thank you for your answer! :)

The main reason I came for help is because I formatted my PC and reinstalled everything and I wanted to start from 0 a new savegame in Sims 3 just in case my save was too bugged or something, so I wanted to set my mods in a proper way and configuration before starting to play.
Before formatting I used to play in Hidden Springs (with Ellacharmed world fix), and the lag was a bit of everything you mentioned in your last paragraph, but the most annoying thing was the clock freezing and the game wouldn't move and lag a lot when speeding the clock to ultra.
And I didn't know Sims 3 don't cap fps on its own!! I always set the monitor refresh to 144 in the in-game options, so I thought it was fine with that, but I just went ingame and typed 'fps on' and it showed 400fps :-o ... now I'm scared the game was hurting my GPU. It's fixed now, I activated Vsync in my Nvidia Control Panel and now it shows 144fps. Thanks for telling me this :)

Since I deleted my old savegame I can't look into the demographics thing. I'll start a new savegame in Hidden Springs and come back here if it starts lagging again.

Thank you for the "Tips" link! Some questions about it:
- it says that "Register" is useful for StoryProgression, what does it do exactly?
- and here "The Town Management document details immigration/emigration, roles, wild animals and strays that might help with cleaning up your town." the link won't work for me (it shows "The requested page could not be found."), I don't know if it is my problem or the forum's, but there are many links that show me that message :\

I will turn off stories and turn down SP's speed as the links says. Do you think I should run SP alone, or am I good installing the modules I mentioned before?

Thanks a lot for your help, I really appreciate it.

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igazor
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Best modules and config to avoid lag?

Post by igazor » December 6th, 2018, 3:04 pm

Yikes no, frame rates in the 400s would not be good for game performance or card health on a 144 Hz monitor. But it could have been worse, your card probably has the ability to throw rates into the thousands given a chance. Glad you got that sorted out. If your card had been seriously damaged, symptoms might have included high pitched whining noises coming from it, overheating, total graphics meltdowns outside of the game (these are difficult to miss) so probably you're fine there. We're not sure what that pull-down menu of frequencies in the Game Options is for, but it doesn't really limit anything. Most (all?) games designed in 2008-09 like this one was don't really account for that.

A new game in HS should be fine, that world isn't widely known for serious routing issues and it won't be overpopulated unless you find a way to shoehorn 100 or 200 extra sims into it yourself somehow (probably not part of the plan).

NRaas Register handles the town's Role and Service Sims and does a much better job of it than EA's built-in systems do. Besides being about 1,000x more reliable, Register allows you to assign Role Sims of your own choosing and decide whether you want the mod to "immigrate" (spawn) new homeless sims as needed for unstaffed objects or try to use unemployed residents first. The pools from which Service Sims are drawn are less easily reached, but there are some controls for that as well. Stray animals are considered Service Sims too, so the Animal Control function falls upon Register as does control of Tourists.

The broken links to documentation pages are a problem for us, that's a leftover issue from our move to this new site two months ago. We can't fix those right now because page edits are locked down until the site's stability improves and I don't know where the Town Population Management page got orphaned to. Here is a link to a slightly older but should still be helpful Wayback Machine version of that page from our former site.
http://web.archive.org/web/201802261651 ... Management

The other NRaas mods that help greatly with performance that I see missing from your current arsenal are Traffic, to a lesser extent GoHere, and Traveler (if world travel is to be in play at all).

I don't see any reason why you should be fearful of running the mods discussed together, although until you can declare your game stable and running well enough you might want to forgo the SP Personality modules in particular (Lovers, Meanies, Cops&Robbers, Others). The "regular" SP modules should be fine (Extra, Career, Skill, Population, Relationship, Money).

Let us know how this all works out, hopefully soon enough your game will be performing closer to as it should and you actually get a chance to have some fun playing it instead of strictly troubleshooting the performance issues.

Alerie
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Best modules and config to avoid lag?

Post by Alerie » December 6th, 2018, 6:23 pm

igazor wrote:
December 6th, 2018, 3:04 pm
Let us know how this all works out, hopefully soon enough your game will be performing closer to as it should and you actually get a chance to have some fun playing it instead of strictly troubleshooting the performance issues.
Thank you!! I've seen your other posts in the Sims official forum and you always help everyone and explain yourself perfectly. EA should hire you :)
I'll come back to share how my game's going, I hope with no more lagging ^^
Thank you and have a good day!

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igazor
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Best modules and config to avoid lag?

Post by igazor » December 6th, 2018, 6:35 pm

Alerie post_id=60800 time=1544138580 user_id=19088 wrote: EA should hire you :)

 
Not sure where you are from, but we have this funny little amendment to our Constitution here in this country that actually prevents us from being "hired" by an entity we have no interest in working for. We've had wars about it and everything, though that was all long ago.

But you're very welcome.  :)

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