That's a nasty habit TS3 has, yeah. Sometimes it forgets that if a Sim wants to go from activity A to activity B, some sort of physical movement may need to happen to get there. And then it just- the next thing.

I have only the basegame installed while I finish up a world I'm working on, and it loads up in seconds and runs like butter.

The Sims is a series which has always had problems with scaling. You'd think they'd figured it out by the fourth installment to have a rough feature roadmap set up, but apparently not.

Yeah, it's definitely looking like 4 is headed the same way. I haven't not had lag in it since 2015. But at least there's no nasty memory limit this time.

Last night I recorded some gameplay to see on video how my game performs, and I've got to say I'm quite surprised. It's actually really smooth. I would've been smoother if I had recorded with OBS (even though it messes up the colors/gamma/saturation) instead of Fraps. Some hiccups you may see when Agnes is at the park don't usually occur in normal gameplay (Fraps was competing with TS3 for the CPU according to the process monitor). This particular save is the one I usually use to do some testing, so it doesn't have all mods installed (only some NRaas mods) and no CC/Store content, so that may help the game to run better (though I usually don't notice the difference). BTW, I'm not using a RAM disk this time.

I'm glad I can also show some of the idles and how lively and autonomous my Sims behave since I unparked my CPU, for those who are still doubting about doing that.



PS: Game is at max settings and I have AA and AO enabled using Nvidia Inspector. Disabling those two things adds 6-10 more frames, so there's no much impact on the game's performance. I just can't live without AA and AO. Once seen, never unseen.

Yes, I'm recording on an SSD. It's impossible to use Fraps unless you have an SSD because not only it is constantly writing to the disc like you said, but the files it writes are uncompressed RAW files of around 1 GB per minute. I really like the image quality that Fraps gives, but it's kinda annoying there's no option to record using a compressed format. OBS is ideal for most cases, but you have to correct the gamma/saturation either using a filter or later on using some video editing software. Otherwise you end up with a video that looks pretty bad... I'll see if I can record later using OBS on the same savegame to compare how the game performs when using one or the other.