Question about Gameplay and Saves

[candiecoatediv]

I play my game on a laptop, it’s a gaming laptop designed to run my game very proficiently. It works very well. Sometimes I run into issues when playing and graphics (usually the animations like photo taking and when it snows) where my game will get a little choppy (if that makes sense). 
I posted an issue about this on this platform and found I’m not the only one running into this. But I’ve mostly attributed the issue with the amount of custom content I have in-game (14.3GB). This ranges from CAS items to mods like MCCC, UI Cheats and SOL. I don’t use reshade, I tried and hated the way my game played. 
so to kind of solve the choppiness of my game (again it only happens during pictures and some animations like snowing) I’ve separated all of my saves into their own folders and keep them on an EHD and when I want to play a specific save I will move them in and out of my Sims folder which is on my actual HD. Along with that, I have slimmed down my CC for each save and only play with about 3-4GB in some saves. As you can imagine, this can be a pain sometime when I want certain cc and don’t have access to it because I’m afraid of overloading my laptop or game. These are the current specs of my laptop: 

ASUS Intel Core i7-9750 CPU @ 2.60GHz 16GB RAM 64 bit 512 SSD Intel UHD Graphics 630 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 120 Hz

I’m wondering is there any limitations in my laptops performance that could be causing this choppiness? When I bought this laptop I wanted something that could handle anything I put into my game. Is it possible to change my sims game directory to run on my EHD to see if that changes anything? Or could that make my game worse? I just want to be able to use all of my CC without having to change things in and out for each game. Any recommendations? 

[puzzlezaddict · Accepted solution]

@candiecoatediv  Yes, it sounds like you're swapping folders already.  It's definitely not necessary for performance reasons alone, but if you have some cc that you don't plan to use in all your saves, it's a good way to keep the overall amount of cc the game needs to load lower.  Besides, some people have a medieval-themed save, or one set in a fantasy world, and don't want what might be considered odd clothing choices to spill over into their regular saves.

I don't think you need GeForce Experience.  You don't technically need it installed, although there no harm in having it.  But letting GFE "optimize" your settings doesn't always work out.  I'd prefer to disable that feature and change my settings manually within the game.

One setting you might want to disable is post-processing.  It takes very little in the way of resources sometimes, and more at other times, but its main effect is to make things look blurry in the distance.  I personally think the scenery looks way too blurry from certain angles (it depends on the world too), so I would never want to play with it enabled, even if it didn't come with a small, or occasionally medium-sized, performance hit.  Still, if you like the visual effect, your graphics card can certainly handle the extra load.

[puzzlezaddict]

@candiecoatediv  There's no reason your hardware should be limiting performance; this is much more likely to be either an issue with the game itself or with your custom content.  The issue with photos in particular seems to happen even on the highest-end hardware; it's just that some aspect of how the function is programmed doesn't work efficiently.

I don't know what custom content you use, but you could test the game out in a clean user data folder with no cc present at all and see whether it makes a difference.  That should let you know whether your cc is contributing to the problem.  While having a lot of cc does increase the initial load time, well-made cc shouldn't drag down performance while Sims 4 is up and running, at least not with your graphics card.  If you find that it does, you may have bad cc, and you'll need to test the files to see what's causing the issue.  And of course, any time you want to download new cc, test it in a clean game folder before adding it to your existing saves.

Another thing you can do to help your computer run the game better is limit your in-game framerates.  If you play in fullscreen mode, enabling vertical sync will help.  There's a setting for it in the game's graphics options.  Or you can go through the built-in Nvidia Control Panel, which may work better and gives more flexibility.  Right-click on your desktop and select Nvidia Control Panel, then Manage 3D Settings, then Program Settings.  Choose TS4_x64.exe (green box), or click Add to the right and find TS4_x64, then select it.  Enable vertical sync (red box): you can try On, Adaptive, or Adaptive (half refresh rate).  Try enabling Triple Buffering (immediately above v-sync) as well, although it's not always necessary.

Something that might make your life easier is having separate user data folders for each save, rather than moving the saves themselves back and forth.  That way, you can add just the cc you want to use in a particular save to that save's folder and keep it out of the other folders if you want.  The entire Sims 4 folder can be moved in and out of Documents\Electronic Arts whenever you want, and since you have an external drive, it should be easy to swap the folders when changing saves.

It's not going to help to run the game off the external drive though.  Unless your internal drive is critically low on space (somewhere below 10 GB free is probably the tipping point, although it varies), it won't help performance, and the connection to the external is going to be orders of magnitude slower than the one to your internal drive.  So while you could technically do it, you'll only make loading times slower.

[candiecoatediv]

@puzzlezaddict Thank you for your rapid response. I she tested in a vanilla game and have noticed the choppiness when taking photos. But I do want to mention it’s funny you brought up GeForce. This is not something I have ever used nor activated an account with. After posting here I jumped on google to get info about my laptop and the best way to utilize the gaming aspect. I’ve had this laptop since September, in fact I think you are one of the users that helped me when I was shopping around (thank you!). It wasn’t until about a month ago that I discovered the Armory Crate and that I can access my game there with specific profile settings. I’ve been using this until someone on YouTube recommend that I use the GeForce Experience to make sure my game is using optimal settings. So I went in to my GeForce and activated it along with updating my driver (which I hadn’t done prior to today). I also went into the my NVIDIA control panel and checked that my sims 4 game is using the NVIDIA GPU settings when playing. I’m just getting into checking to see if I notice anything wonky, hopefully not.
I may need clarification when you mention user data folders. Right now for example I have a sims 4 game named the sims 4.100baby in my EA folder in my documents. When I want to play my legacy folder, I take the .100baby folder out and put in my .grace-legacy. Of course after each swap when in game renaming to The Sims 4 so my game will recognize it. I initially had several saves in one folder, then saw a video recommending different save names but she had them all in her EA my documents folder. But she said it was a way to be able to use different CC and Mods for different saves. I liked the idea but was worried about how much space it would take so I took all of those saves and put them on the EHD so now I just love them back and forth when I want to play a particular save. Is this the same as you were recommending?

[puzzlezaddict · Accepted solution]

@candiecoatediv  Yes, it sounds like you're swapping folders already.  It's definitely not necessary for performance reasons alone, but if you have some cc that you don't plan to use in all your saves, it's a good way to keep the overall amount of cc the game needs to load lower.  Besides, some people have a medieval-themed save, or one set in a fantasy world, and don't want what might be considered odd clothing choices to spill over into their regular saves.

I don't think you need GeForce Experience.  You don't technically need it installed, although there no harm in having it.  But letting GFE "optimize" your settings doesn't always work out.  I'd prefer to disable that feature and change my settings manually within the game.

One setting you might want to disable is post-processing.  It takes very little in the way of resources sometimes, and more at other times, but its main effect is to make things look blurry in the distance.  I personally think the scenery looks way too blurry from certain angles (it depends on the world too), so I would never want to play with it enabled, even if it didn't come with a small, or occasionally medium-sized, performance hit.  Still, if you like the visual effect, your graphics card can certainly handle the extra load.

[candiecoatediv]

@puzzlezaddict Thank you so much for the clarification and help! I didn’t have to download GeForce as much as activate an account to update my graphics driver. But so far I can already tell my game looks a lot smoother (if that makes sense). Again, as always thank you for your time and patience in helping figure things out. I wish I knew more about computers and such lol.