Sims 3 crashing no matter what so far.

[Iron Mal]

So I recently bought this game and most of the expansions, but it keeps crashing and I cant for the life of me figure out why. I have the settings on max (maybe i should change this?) but my PC should be able to handle this game with little issue. I do have all my EPs installed and i can get in game and it seems a little bit sluggish but only cause ive played the Sims 4 on this rig and I know how smooth that runs for me, other than that its not really noticeable but out of no where while playing itll like have a moment where it stutters a bit, freezes then crashes. Now I know this game is terribly optimized but ffs, my pc runs anything and everything on the market right now from Baldurs Gate 3 to Cyberpunk 2077 to Half Life Alyx, etc.. I just want to be able to experience this game again but it keeps crashing.

Its worth noting that I have tried changing the compatibility of every expansion and the base game in the properties to run as admin and compatible with win95 since i read that that should help, and it did but instead of crashing after 3-5 mins I crashed after like 10 mins.

Its also worth noting that this game is not overheating my hardware, my cpu peaked at about 68C and my GPU at 63C and while these numbers are certainly higher than Id expect or want from a game this old, I understand that Maxis ♥♥♥♥ the bed on optimization for this game so fair enough. These are NOT high temps at all though, Cyberpunk keeps my hardware in the 70s after hours of playtime and I wouldnt worry until any game put my temps in the 80s or 90s.

Finally these are my specs if you think you know of a way to help me not crash after 10 seconds of gameplay please let me know haha

CPU: i5 7600 3.5GHz

GPU: RTX 2070 Super 8gb

RAM: 32GB

[HiFive]

Have you already seen these 2 guides?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1131162350
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=279488894

Max settings on everything is not always the best fit for this game, especially the framerate.

[Hanabirajoy]

I've been having this same issue as of today. I also have an RTX 2070 Super 8GB. But my Cpu is AMD Ryzen 3700x and 16GB of Ram. I've been playing the game flawlessly with absolutely no issues (not a stutter) and logged about 150 or so hours of total playtime and suddenly today it's been crashing out of nowhere all day long. Literally every 20 mins or so. Sometimes running flawlessly no stutters into sudden crash. Sometimes starting with and occasional hiccup here and there and then a freeze into a crash. I have nothing but Nrass mods and a few CC hairs and a couple pairs of jeans for the guys. But I've had all these same CC since I started my save 150+ hours ago in the very beginning and it worked flawlessly no hiccups, no stutter, no freezes until today. I don't know what happened. I have vsync on via Nvidia control panel, framerate capped at 60hz (I play on my 60hz samsung TV monitor) and everything.

I've tried everything in The Sims 3 steam Optimization guide above and still getting random crashes. Nothing works. I ran it in windowed mode and simultaneously monitored my Cpu, Gpu and ram. Gpu running at about 35% @ 55°C max, Cpu running at less than 30% and between 40°-50°C. Nothing went over 60°C from what I can tell. My ram usage was kinda highish I guess at about 5.5Gb (35ish %) max, but that was accounting for the total amount of Ram being used by by my entire PC generally while running The Sims 3. And I have 16G of Ram and change the usable Ram for The Sims 3 specifically to 8Gb (half of my 16) in the Sims3.ini file like instructed above.

I'm truly stumped as to why this game suddenly decided it doesn't want to run when it was previously running like butter.

I do have all EPs and run them all when I play except Into the Future. But again, I've been playing the same way from the start as I got bored of the Sims 4 and bought the game and every expansion while it was on sale for like 5 or 6$. I could see if I suddenly made any changes to the game or added anything, that would make sense to me but, yeah it's been the same config since the beginning and only now started to crash. I'm starting to think that perhaps this game becomes more unstable the longer you play it? 🤔

I will say that I am new to gaming especially on PC in general because of the whole quarantine thing but I don't have any issues with any other games Including The Sims 4 or any of my Tomb Raider games. If only the Sims 4 was as half as much fun as 3 😣

[HiFive]

I assume you've already had Steam verify the files?

[igazor]

You can't really change the amount of RAM that TS3 uses no matter what some of the various guides here say. It is a Large Address Aware (LAA) 32-bit application and will reach for up to just under 4 GB when it needs to all by itself. That's the best it can ever do, a 32-bit application cannot address more RAM than that. If the game ever reaches for more than ~3.7 GB even for a microsecond, it will crash or Error12 upon trying to save, which is just as bad because no one wants to play a game that they cannot save.

The ini fle setting that looks like it defaults to 2 GB is really something else, it's the upper limit of the game's script heap, and its default value is 20 GB, not 2 GB. It should not really be changed.

The goal with longer running ongoing TS3 games on modern hardware is to reduce resource usage, not increase it, while maintaining a fun and satisfying level of playability.

I've been playing the same ongoing game since late 2011 with all EPs added in over time and although it requires care and tending to, it's all still fine. Mod usage can help a lot. There are other things that can as well.
http://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE

[Hanabirajoy]

I play The Sims on Origin, all my other games on Steam tho'. I know that these guidelines are meant to optimize the steam version but, I was desperate and didn't know where else to turn. I did repair the game multiple times through Origin Tho' to no avail, still getting the random crashes. And I'm playing a farming family in Riverview with a 82MB save file. This game should not be crashing like this on my machine. It's more than capable. I'm truly stumped.


As far as forcing the game to use more Ram, that's good to know that that doesn't actually work. At least I feel less crazy. Perhaps my PC just isn't capable? I have Overwatch and Error Trap, I don't get many error notifications maybe two or three every session, which when it wasn't crashing I'll admit were about 4-6 hr sessions 🤭

So I really really don't know what the issue is. There are back round program running like Like anti virus etc, but whenever I play I make sure that everything is closed and optimized so that the PC is using as little Ram as possible before I even start up the game. And like I said I. Total my PC only was using 5.5G of Ram running The Sims 3 plus all back round programs that I couldn't disable or turn off. Before I startup the game my computer on average is using about 3-3.5GB (20%) of Ram just running idle. Could that be the issue maybe? That my PC just is using to much Ram generally? Like I said the game was running beautifully for weeks. Like soooooooooooo super smooth with everything installed at max settings. It's like it just decided that it doesn't want to run anymore. My Nvidia driver did update through Geforce Experience automatically like it usually does, and the crashes did start after that but I that can't be the problem right? Aren't drives supposed to be updated for the game to run well? Also, I tried reinstalling the drivers and it still crashed, froze in edit worlds and then crashed 😣

I'm so sad. I guess I've just got to move on from this game. Its a shame because I was really falling in love with it. It really is a great game gameplay wise. EA sucks for not optimizing it after all these years and force the snooze fest that is The Sims 4 down our throats. A 64 bit application would really do this game wonders. Maybe I'll get a Mac and move over my save file specially for the Sims 3 😂😂🤭

[HiFive]

Originally posted by igazor:

You can't really change the amount of RAM that TS3 uses no matter what some of the various guides here say. It is a Large Address Aware (LAA) 32-bit application and will reach for up to just under 4 GB when it needs to all by itself. That's the best it can ever do, a 32-bit application cannot address more RAM than that. If the game ever reaches for more than ~3.7 GB even for a microsecond, it will crash or Error12 upon trying to save, which is just as bad because no one wants to play a game that they cannot save.

Thanks. This explains why "changing" the amount of RAM the game uses, per one of the guides, didn't seem to help. Saving more frequently and keeping inventories as uncluttered as possible seems to be the biggest help for me.

[Hanabirajoy]

So I got it running smoothly again 😁 Well, actually my friend did. Appearently, it was an issue with my CPU minimum and maximum performance settings. I don't remember what they were but essentially what I was told was that the CPU max performance was set too low to keep up with the graphics card performance so it was bottlenecking once it reached a certain point and crashing the game. He set the max performance to 100% now and the game is running super smoothly again just like before! Played for 2hrs yesterday and 4hrs today with super smooth performance and no crashes!!! So happy rn that I get to keep playing, cause I'm loving this game. 😊 I hope OP figured out the problem with their game too!