Recognising Newer Graphics Cards for Sims2

Re - DirectX upgrading - I thought I upgraded to 11 when I installed this card.
The drivers are all new with my new card - they released a new driver, like, the day before I installed it. So, new new.
My old card was an 8600 SLI (Nvidia) but, only one of the cards was working. The other card died about a year ago. I think one of the reports I sent you mentioned the old card too - I still have it in there, but I don't want to use it for the sims. And it's not SLI with this one.
The opening screen animation still stutters... but I haven't crashed yet. Keep those fingers crossed. I may be OK. But, I'd STILL like to use my shadows

I'm looking into it still.

So far the reading that I've done, suggest drivers update/rollback, suggests that there might be a power problem, suggests version of DirectX there are multiple versions of DirectX 11. So we have 3 different avenues to take.

Have you tested the shadows with the O/S compatibility changed to XP2 yet? What happened.

When you say the opening screen animation still stutters - is that the scrolling text, or the whole screen?

Yes, I tried the shadows - still have the black box when on high

The animation problem I notice is when it's flying over the hood. It's always had a few hesitations, but now it's much more - like 5 or 6 mini-freezes.

I wasn't able to trigger any other animation sequences within play of the game - I really don't know what to do to trigger one, as I never really play. Tonight I played Lothario through a day, and the Dreamers through another whole day. Mostly uneventful. Someone stole Don's newspaper while he was at work, and young Mr. Dreamer failed to get dressed after his shower. *blink!*

Then I did some work on the furniture store I'm rebuilding...

I haven't shut the game down yet, before I do I'm going to try and make my black kitty-cat in CAP - that's where I crashed out the other day. We'll see if it crashes.
Then I'm going to bed! G'nite <3


ETA: I was able to finish making the cat, and exit the game normally. The only thing strange was when I "accepted" the cat and the 'flash bulb' flash went off, my screen - starting in the lower left corner - went black in big black blocks. It happened very quickly - like a split second thing - and maybe 3 progressively larger blocks until the whole screen was black. But then, instantly I was back to the picture it should've been and everything was OK. Is that a normal behavior? I've made lots of sims but, don't remember ever seeing that before... But, maybe it's not a bad thing?
G'nite... and thank YOU for sticking with this, I'm seeing improvements all 'round

OK. Glad to hear that the crashing has slowed down. I'll have a look into the graphics driver thing, and see if you need to do anything.

I naively purchased the NVIDIA 710M / Intel 4000 combination assuming that the card would be superior to my old box's card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti. I was wrong, NVIDIA 710M is weak and I could have saved 300 bucks and bought laptop with the same specs but with only a Intel 4000 only card. Intel 4000 works fine with the Sims 2, 710M requires too many work arounds and overrides from the control panel, and it still doesn't look too good because of the antialiasing issues. For those of you who have a 750+ card, then you'll still need to do those hacks because it's better than Intel's card, but if you have a low entry Nvidia GPU like mine, then just add your Intel 4000 card info to your Video Card Rules and edit the following line in your Graphics Rules:

CHANGE:

PHP Code:

elseif (match("${cardVendor}", "Intel"))
      if (match("${cardName}", "*X3000*")) 


TO:

PHP Code:

elseif (match("${cardVendor}", "Intel"))
      if (match("${cardName}", "*X3000*") or match("${cardName}", "*4000*")) 


You won't need to do anything else as the game will recognize the card as capable and will allow smoothing, natural grass and reflective water, etc. TS2 accepts the G965 3000 card and the 4000 card is far superior to it, so you won't blow out your card. I say that only after I compared benchmarks and with *no* expertise whatsoever. If you're worried, do the research yourself on DDG.

FYI for those with better Nvidia cards combined with the Intel 4000, from my own tests I noticed that the log doesn't recognize the Nvidia card even when it is being used by the game. The only work around is that I could figure out was to manually set the specifications under Intel. Nvidia is the card that handles the rules, but again your log doesn't acknowledge this. You can tell if this works by looking at the process in the system tray. If it is gray then Nvidia is not being used with the game; if it is colourful then it is. You can also test which card is being used by disabling the Nvidia option and requiring your game to run under Intel. You'll immediately see the difference.

I'm on Windows 8.1 at the moment (seriously considering downgrading over the weekend), and there are two bugs I can't fix:

#1 - is the black screen once a neighbourhood is loaded. My work around is to do a faux external monitor swap and switch back. It only happens at the start of the game and it only started happening after I followed the MTS suggestion to run the game under Windows XP (2) compatibility. I didn't have any problems loading my hoods before that *bangs head* Now I can't seem to fix it and will probably have to do a reinstall of M&G in hopes of getting it to work like before. Anyone else have this problem and a fix to it?

#2 - the black shadow of doom that makes it impossible to set your shadows past medium. Judging from the comments here--there is no fix yet. Can we keep troubleshooting that?

This is how I got my graphics working. I hope this info helps. Here is my config-log for Intel 4000:

  NEWLAPTOP-config-log.txt (Size: 10.3 KB / Downloads: 472)

Thanks for this info Nanashi, it looks spot on, and will help others who have this issue. I'm still looking into the black shadows problem, I'm not sure if there is a fix but will do my best to find the best fix I can.

(22-01-2014 12:11 PM)nanashi Wrote:  #2 - the black shadow of doom that makes it impossible to set your shadows past medium. Judging from the comments here--there is no fix yet. Can we keep troubleshooting that?

Yeah, that.

Stupid Q here: Is there a way to tell if my mobo has onboard graphics? For some reason, I don't think it does... my "Big Rig" PC was built to be a gaming machine (6 years ago) with SLI GPUs.

Thank you, Kiri, for continuing to look for a solution to the black box shadow. I eagerly await any advances toward a solution

Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Display adapters

Will list the discrete graphics cards that you have in your system. I'm not too sure if it will list whatever is on the motherboard.

What is your motherboard? Probably the easiest way to work out what it has on it, is to google it with the exact details - version, etc.

(22-01-2014 02:15 PM)celebkiriedhel Wrote:  Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Display adapters

... then no on-board graphics, just my cards. My mobo is Asus P5N-E SLI.

I just did the CFF/DEP thing from MTS2 - I'm going to fire up the game and see what happens

I also noticed this:    
Does that tell you anything?

(22-01-2014 02:15 PM)celebkiriedhel Wrote:  Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Display adapters

Will list the discrete graphics cards that you have in your system. I'm not too sure if it will list whatever is on the motherboard.

What is your motherboard? Probably the easiest way to work out what it has on it, is to google it with the exact details - version, etc.

I think what you need to do is type WINKEY+R and in the run box type msinfo32. This will display everything attached to your motherboard from your PnP Device ID to your I/O ports. It's also easier to read than Device Manager. This run prompt is a must know if you're a 'tinker' sim... I mean person

* Just to make sure that we're speaking the same language: WINKEY is the windows flag key usually next to ALT