I am rather new to sims 3 and have been on the hunt for a few answers when I came upon this thread of a similar issue...

My game and system:

Game: Sims 3 base, WA, HLS, AM, LN, OL, GEN
System: Custom x58 gaming build, Core i7 950 quad, 12Gb DDR3 SDRAM, 2Gb Radeon HD 6950, Catalyst 12.1, Win 7-64

I do have many mods and packages installed mostly clothes, furn, and decorations.  Cleaned out bad and blacklisted cc to the best of my ability.

The issue I am experiencing is a number of FPS and GPU usage spikes.  Frequently, while playing, the GPU usage drops to 0% when technically should be working, then it starts and moves to around 50% to 60%, then suddenly back to 0%. Temps however never exceed 55C despite FPS spiking at around 600, probably due to factory custom  GPU cooling (MSI Twin Frozr III).

The game does tend to lag a bit and these spikes occur even while running with no cc at all.  

The game remains playable, albeit barely, but the spikes are irritating and I cannot figure out why the GPU usage hits 0%.  FPS limiter seems to have no effect.

I am an avid gamer on this PC (Elderscrolls games, SWToR, COH, WoT, AION, MSFlightSim, etc) and the Sims 3 is the only game I play that has this issue.

I wonder if any of you have this issue as well, or if this issue is related to the issues being discussed on this thread.

Danke!


(Postscript--discovered another EA gamer at evga.com forums that is experiencing a similar issue with battlefield 3 which leads me to believe this may be an EA coding issue and if so, not much can be done unfortunately.  Nevertheless, the issue continues.....)