The Sims 3 Crashing 0xc000005

[ArvisDren]

Alright you guys, I am in dire need of assistance right now. I have a fresh install of the game. just made my character and a dog, and bought a furnished house. Everything was going well until I decided to scroll out. Instantly the game froze, I laughed and relaunched the game thinking it was just a hickup. 2 minutes after playing I tried it again. Nope crashed. I launched microsoft visual studios to help give me a debug/crash report. 0xc000005 access violation to this location. and the locations would always change. After crashing and trying to figure out how to fix this for 6 hours I got into contact with windows customer support and did a clean install on all windows files. Problem is still persisting and I am currently waiting on EA support to try and help me out. I have searched online and there are some people that are mentioning RAM usage is too much.

I have 16 gigs of ram and the game is crashing at 2 gigs being used. I also have an RTX 2070super, terabytes of hardrive space, i7-7820x. Windows 10 with the freshest files possible as of 0255 august 11 2022.

I also changed d3d9.dll ownership and "full control" to every user and group on the PC.

Because I also believe this is the case with some different ways to install the game, its the Steam version-with all the DLC.

I really hope you guys can help me out, it really would be great to play this game considering I just bought all the DLC for it.

[puzzlezaddict]

Access violations have many potential causes, anything from going over the game's RAM limit to bad mods or custom content to hardware issues. (This is unlikely to be a hardware issue; I'm just saying that's how nonspecific the error is.) But given the graphics card you have, my first question is whether you've taken steps to cap your in-game framerates. Sims 3 doesn't have a working fps limiter of its own, and extremely high fps can cause crashing all by itself.

It's easy enough to cap framerates through the Nvidia Control Panel. Right-click on the desktop and select the CP, click Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings, choose ts3w.exe (with the W, since you have a Steam install) from the list, and enable Vertical Sync (On or Adaptive) and Triple Buffering. If you ever play in windowed mode, set a Max Frame Rate as well, specifically at whatever the refresh rate of your monitor is.

You can double-check that the limit is applying in-game with a cheat. Open the cheats console (crtl-shift-C) and enter "fps on" without quotes, and the number will appear in the upper-right corner of the screen. To turn it off again, use "fps off."

[ArvisDren]

Originally posted by puzzlezaddict:

Access violations have many potential causes, anything from going over the game's RAM limit to bad mods or custom content to hardware issues. (This is unlikely to be a hardware issue; I'm just saying that's how nonspecific the error is.) But given the graphics card you have, my first question is whether you've taken steps to cap your in-game framerates. Sims 3 doesn't have a working fps limiter of its own, and extremely high fps can cause crashing all by itself.

It's easy enough to cap framerates through the Nvidia Control Panel. Right-click on the desktop and select the CP, click Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings, choose ts3w.exe (with the W, since you have a Steam install) from the list, and enable Vertical Sync (On or Adaptive) and Triple Buffering. If you ever play in windowed mode, set a Max Frame Rate as well, specifically at whatever the refresh rate of your monitor is.

You can double-check that the limit is applying in-game with a cheat. Open the cheats console (crtl-shift-C) and enter "fps on" without quotes, and the number will appear in the upper-right corner of the screen. To turn it off again, use "fps off."

The only problem with this is that I have my nvidia settings set to Vsync in the graphics card itself. So that isn't the Issue, I dont have a hardwarre problem as every single game other than this one is working properly. The RAM shouldn't be the issue because it is crashing randomly at 2 gigs, which I have plenty more, and Its a clean install, so there aren't any mods/custom content. Only the DLC's..

[puzzlezaddict]

Do you play in fullscreen or windowed mode, and have you tried the other one?

Do you have any gaming optimization software installed, and have you tried disabling it before you play?

It's also a good idea to turn down high-detail lots to no more than 2; the option is with the other graphics settings. This is a limit of the game engine.

[ArvisDren]

Originally posted by puzzlezaddict:

Do you play in fullscreen or windowed mode, and have you tried the other one?

Do you have any gaming optimization software installed, and have you tried disabling it before you play?

It's also a good idea to turn down high-detail lots to no more than 2; the option is with the other graphics settings. This is a limit of the game engine.

I did all of those things, even restarted windows in a clean boot state, where no other programs excluding required windows programs were running. Graphics didn't have a part in it, and nor did any other background applications.

But good news, I did find a fix for the problem. I found a guide here on steam that talked about performance optimizations; I'm not sure how to link it here though. It states that because the game isn't coming out with anymore updates, future graphic cards (ones that we have today) aren't getting recognized properly by the game and the information that is being given to them isn't working as well as it should be. They recommended that downloading a crash log reader for sims 3 would help a lot for the crashes that the game does have. I downloaded it, and it was telling me my graphics were the problem of the crashes. I went back to the instructions and there was a download to update the game with all the next gen graphics cards. I installed the update and so far it hasn't crashed once. Played for about 4 hours straight.

So I'm really hoping that I found the perfect answer for anyone who is also having this issue.