More Awesome Than You!

I have an NVidia 8600GT card with 512MB RAM and the game set my Sim detail to medium. I tried to set it to highest and the game doesn't start. What's wrong?
The graphcs at medium detail is crap.

My friend has an NVidia 7600GT with 256MB RAM and has the same problem.

You must construct additional pylons?

Theres a thread around here that talks about NVidia cards. Apparently the game is not managing the anisotropic filtering right. There are instructions to set your cards. Search on that word, that's how I found it.

I had to turn on my anisotropic settings to be managed by the Catalyst AI, not by the application.

I have a 7600GS (512) and have had no problems with Sim Detail set to high, and I've had it set that way from the beginning.

I have an 8800 GTS with 512MB of RAM, and am able to set the sim detail to the highest. It doesn't seem to be high 100% of the time, though: townie sim detail on community lots sometimes goes to a lower setting, it seems.

What improved my general graphics detail quite a bit was doing the thing witch suggested and fix the anisotropic filtering settings. Even just setting it to x2 improved the detail to a great deal.

I have a 6150 and have no problem. Try anisotropic filtering as a member above me said. It helped tons with my game :).

If I can run it, so can you. Haha. I have no lag, except for CAS either.

I have a 9800 GT that I just upgraded to.  It works great, all settings are on high, and I haven't had any lag or freezing.  Although, every time I get into CAS about 10 minutes in there and I get a CTD! I have no idea if it's just the game or the card can't handle it! It's really irritating since I love making sims.  Anybody else have this problem?

CTD? What does that stand for? Crash to desktop?

What about your other specs, it's certainly not the card. As that card shouldn't have any issues with sims...

Yeah, Crash to Desktop.

Other specs would be
Processor- Intel Pentium D 930@3000MHz
Memory - 2 GB DDR2
Free Disk Space - 380 GB

Do you think it's the RAM?  I plan on upgrading it soon to 4 GB, It's weird though, in gameplay it's fine.  I played yesterday for probably 3 hours with no Crash to desktop and no lagging or freezing. So why would it crash in CAS? I've noticed a lot of the time is when I'm messing with the create a style function!

edalbformat, are you using the newest drivers from the nVidia site?  If not, try updating them and see if that helps.

I had a bit of confusion when getting that set up with my card (9500GT I think, can't check now), I could only get it to configure the LAUNCHER instead of the actual game exe. Hitting Add and selecting TS3.exe didn't add a new entry, just kept the launcher selected. The remove button for the launcher was grayed out, so I couldn't even try to remove it. I changed the anisotropic filtering for the launcher to see if that even did anything, and it seemed to actually be affecting the game despite having the wrong exe selected. Textures didn't look like crap when viewed from a short distance away, and the hideous seams along model edges went away. (They also showed up in World of Warcraft (http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk143/Saikatsu/charpanelseams.png), they're actually really hard to catch a proper image of and look a LOT worse than this example.)
Then when I ran the game again later, the hideousness was back. :\ No idea what I need to do to make it stick, nor any way to get the correct exe selected in my card's control panel. (WoW, on the other hand, has retained its non-crappiness. No more holes in things at the center of the mesh (http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk143/Saikatsu/modelgap.png).)

I have an ancient NVIDIA 6600 and have no problem setting sim detail to high. I have no idea what anisotropic filtering is, but I went into my NVIDIA driver settings and made sure that my settings for Quality override game settings. It's possible that my game runs slower, but it seems fine to me.

I managed to set up the game to Very High Detail Sim in my 8600 GT and I suppose that it was just a question of Video RAM (I have 512, my friend has 256), so I suppose that it just a question of upgrading her graphic card.
As to RAM, I don't think that feeding up the computer with a lot of extra RAM will help that much. I have only 2GB RAM and my friend has 4GB. My computer has better performance than hers.
We have both Code page set for 4096.
Setting the game to Very High Detail helped a lot cause now I can at least identify those puddings, before I could not see a difference between two Sims.
Anyway it is not helping much when Sims are outdoors. I can have a better image when they are indoors but as soon as they open the door, a lot of shadows mainly in their mouth, make them look like they are permanent vomiting (or secreting chocolate)

I'll check this monster word suggested to see if I can get more sauce to my bbq (arrgh! I'm vegetarian!). As to new drivers, my graphic card is pretty new and anyway I'm intended to get newer ones as soon as my pocket can afford it. RAM and gcards are quite expensive over here and normally you cannot get a computer on a normal shop with higher specifications once there are no programs for regular users that requires that much graphics and RAM. I use to buy in specialized computer shops and even there you have to request an upgrade at the moment of shopping cause not even them have anything higher, ready made. It makes the computer twice or three times more expensive. For example, my basic computer last bought had an original price of 9.000 our money. After upgrading before bringing it home first time, I got a final price of 14000. This is unacceptable for normal buyers. Not even companies accept such increase.
Regular special offers shows to be very low speed RAM or anything that you will sure regret first time you use the machine.
I have no more patience to assemble computers self.

I'm running with 4GB RAM and an ATI X850XT card - game and graphics (set to high) are fine except that I get a CTD after I've used CAS to modify clothing or appearance.  I discovered that if I immediately save after exiting CAS, no crash. 

That said, I allowed the 12-year old to play TS3 under a different account on my computer.  CTD.  I saw two warning popups claiming that a script running under Internet Explorer had stopped running (this appears only in the secondary account).  WTF???   EAxis up to no good in the background no doubt, because I disconnect my DSL modem before starting up the game and never use IE.

The crashes continued each time she tried to play until I changed the firewall setting by not closing it down completely, but setting it to block all Internet activity.  That's worked for her.   

My firewall is set so that no EAxis program has permission to access the Internet.  Since it appears to continue trying, I'll have to experiment with the ZA kill command.

I've never used the launcher.  The secondary account also uses the .exe file.  Or it's supposed to.

Guess I'll better go cootie hunting tonight...

Yay, got it to work. Sat down both and investigated whole computer. It is a damn advanced motherboard with SLI for multiple GPU cards bla-bla-bla and we almost fall out of the chair when verified that the GeForce driver in use was dated JUNE 2006. The driver is far older than the computer self. Blame us who stopped messing up with the device manager.
Got all I could out of NVidia and magic - everything went smoothly. Installed the new drivers and tried to set the SimDetail to highest. The game seems a little slower but got to identify the puddings on her computer also (though still look like secreting chocolate thru the mouth).

Problem solved. We can keep some cash for extra RAM for me. Lucky me!  ;D

BTW - I never used the launcher either. Got the game after all the info were out. Our computers are not connected to internet and I have to be drunk to let EA install even a jpg image in my compie. Fortunately I'm also alergic to alkies.

I have been using a no cd crack and I have never used the launcher, but I'll test that out and see if it works for me! Hopefully it will! I'll also try the save after exiting CAS! Thanks for the tips! :)

Edalbformat- Glad you got things figured out! :)

 Jordi-

As I have always just let the application decide,  and although my picture seems fine enough, I have never really messed with my video cards settings as not being of the awesome mindset I felt all things must be performing as expected. Granted i should know better - being a long time user of EA games, but I have the additional problem of being "ultra electrified" and can send foot long streaks of static sparks of pop and crackle from my fingertips  from a foot away - i leave computer care to my obviously way awesome hubby and the occasional visit from my utterly awesome son. Seems neither of which think I need to mess with the anisotropic filtering and said if i did so - I was doing it on my own stubborn recourse. They know better than argue I guess. So I opened up the Nvidia  thing, went to advanced and set it as the picture above showed -  for the Sims 3 .exe, and at 16x. Applied and left.

As I have not yet played the game since doing that today, as I just finsihed my real world work a short while ago - I was thinking is 16x the right one for my system. My video card is a PNY Geforce 9400 with 1 gig of ram onboard. My system is an AMD Phenom 64 bit quad core with 6 gigs of Corsair Xtreme Performance ram. I have sata 320 HDS (Western Digital) with sata Litescribe Write master DVD rom with Speed plus. i run XP Pro service pack 3 as I did not like Vista and already own a new copy of the XP.


I don't need the pc nerds in my family hitting me with a lot of I told you so's and learn to leave well enough alone crap. So I'd really appreciate knowing before I fire the game up if at all possible.