Sims2 Sims 2 UC Win10 Pink Flashing

Hi,

I've been very busy with work, so sorry for the delays with testing. Anyway, I think I've made some progress - and here's what I've done:

Before changing any BIOS settings I got an idea of testing how much GPU memory my game is currently using. I already had an program capable of monitoring that, I just have not thought of looking into it before. After some test runs I noticed that my game was only using about 30% of my GPU memory - so not even near of all of it. This made me doubt how much of an effect it would have to increase GPU memory even more.

So instead of going to BIOS settings I looked my graphic rules file again. I found a line of code with an interesting comment:

# never trust the driver to manage its own memory
boolProp enableDriverMemoryManager false

After reasoning that since the game is relatively old its own memory management might be utilizing far less GPU memory than it is provided, so I changed this setting to true and tested playing the game. After a longer period than usually without pink flashing I'd say that this variable might have had some effect on how well the game is allocating memory. I also noticed that while monitoring the memory usage the game is actually using a bit less memory than before.

I still have to play some more before I'm sure that the pink flashing is gone, but right now this is looking promising.

@Epi7 Brilliant - if you do more testing, can you let me know how you go? Thanks.

(20-06-2017 11:16 PM)Epi7 Wrote:  # never trust the driver to manage its own memory
boolProp enableDriverMemoryManager false

So I just quickly made an account to say THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! This has helped my game more than any other information out there (as far as 2017 info). It's great to know why pink flashing graphics happens in game, but a definitive solution is even better. Hopefully Mr. Google will find these results so more people can find this info.

And just for clarity, here are my specs:

OS: Windows 10 Home (64-bit)
Processor: AMD FX-8320 (8 core) 3.5Ghz
RAM: 32GB
G Card: Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 4GB
Sims 2 Version: Ultimate Collection

@celebkiriedhel

Well, it's been some time. The real life got in the way, but at least I've had enough time for proper testing. Sadly the flashing still occurs and I'm completely out of ideas. When I have time I will try running my game with another GPU that has 8GB memory instead of 3GB. We'll see if that makes any difference.

Still, thanks for all the help in the past.

I am so stealing your idea to try in my sgr! Thank you for finding this.

Epi7 Wrote:So instead of going to BIOS settings I looked my graphic rules file again. I found a line of code with an interesting comment:

# never trust the driver to manage its own memory
boolProp enableDriverMemoryManager false

After reasoning that since the game is relatively old its own memory management might be utilizing far less GPU memory than it is provided, so I changed this setting to true and tested playing the game.

Another tweak I've been testing from Graphic Rules.sgr

# on NVidia cards, create a dummy texture on device creation to prevent BSODs
boolProp createNVidiaWorkaroundTexture true

Well. This might have been true with the NVidia cards ten years ago. With the modern graphics drivers I really do doubt. So I changed this to false.

So far I haven't saw any BSODs, so I left it false. I still got the pink flashing, but I think disabling this kind of things just might take the NVidia owners a one step closer to how the game works with other manufacturer's cards (as we have more problems with NVidia).

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After more proper testing I'd say this made my game crash more. Well, at least I've ruled it out now.