Best way to increase performance without sacrificing visuals?

[Hideus_Ex]

I like to take a lot of screenshots from my game so I always have my graphics at max, however the game really takes a toll on my PC and one of the more annoying problems I have is whenever I'm loading a new lot or even during the game sometimes anything I have on the background like music or videos will start lagging or stop altogether. Now I don't know if it's a RAM problem or my processor or whatever but I'd like to know if there are any settings I could change that make the game less resource intensive while retaining the visual quality, otherwise I may have to take the hit.

[puzzlezaddict · Accepted solution]

@Hideus_Ex  Your processor is fine for Sims 4, and it should be fine for playing Sims 4 and listening to music or watching videos at the same time.  Your other hardware is also fine for the game, provided it's performing reasonably well.  The 750 ti should be able to run all packs together reasonably well on ultra graphics settings, at least most of the time—some worlds will have fps drops, and using high poly custom content makes the game more demanding too.  Different players will have slightly different experiences.

Without seeing how your computer runs the game in real time, I can't know what's going on for sure.  But I can take a guess as to why you might notice things slowing down.  Your system has only 8 GB memory, which is enough for Sims 4 but maybe not for Sims 4 plus a music app plus a few browser windows plus the YouTube video in one of those windows.  When the game is loading, or loading a different neighborhood, it's literally loading data from your hard drive into memory.  All the other apps you're currently running will have data stored in memory too.  You could easily be running out of RAM while you're playing.

This doesn't necessarily mean that apps will start crashing—Windows 10 is very efficient at managing memory use.  What it does, when there's not enough RAM for everything, is swap some data to the page file, which is a designated space on your hard drive intended for exactly this overflow.  Windows calculates what really needs to stay in RAM (e.g. the lot currently being simulated as you're playing) and what can be swapped to page file (e.g. that video you were watching ten minutes ago but is currently paused).  When you want to recall some data from the page file, it has to be transferred back to RAM, and something else has to go into the page file.

The issue here is that nothing is faster than RAM, and your hard drive is so much slower that you would definitely notice a delay while a large amount of data is being transferred.  This swap is faster on a solid state drive, but still noticeable under certain circumstances.  Furthermore, no matter how fast your hard drive is, your RAM has a hard cap on available space, so if you're running a lot of apps together, not just that they're open but that you're trying to use them in real time, all those apps might collectively be using more memory than you have installed, leading to a situation where date is constantly being swapped back and forth.  Again, I can't know if this is happening without watching your system in real time, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were.

What you could try, if you wanted, would be installing more memory.  RAM is not so expensive, especially modules that run at a slower speed, as yours might.  You'd want to match the exact specifications of your current memory; the best thing to do would be to find the product number on the RAM stick(s) and try to buy the same thing, or at the very least RAM equivalent in speed and timings.

A solid state drive would speed things up considerably too, not only for swapping to the page file but for loading times in general.  But SSDs are expensive, and you might not want to invest that much money in an older system.  Plus, you'd need to install Windows on the SSD to get the full benefits.

It's not a good idea to mess with the page file settings, unless you understand why you're making the changes.  For example, it's not necessary to increase the size of the page file itself; Windows will increase it as needed, unless you've manually changed the number already.

Or, you could try not running so many apps at the same time.  Minimize what you're not using, or just close the programs; keep an eye on the Task Manager too, and kill any processes using too much memory.  Some websites seem to eat CPU resources as well, for whatever reason, so make sure your browser isn't hogging the processor, and if it is, close tabs as necessary.  It might take some experimenting to figure out a good balance.

[puzzlezaddict · Accepted solution]

@Hideus_Ex  Your processor is fine for Sims 4, and it should be fine for playing Sims 4 and listening to music or watching videos at the same time.  Your other hardware is also fine for the game, provided it's performing reasonably well.  The 750 ti should be able to run all packs together reasonably well on ultra graphics settings, at least most of the time—some worlds will have fps drops, and using high poly custom content makes the game more demanding too.  Different players will have slightly different experiences.

Without seeing how your computer runs the game in real time, I can't know what's going on for sure.  But I can take a guess as to why you might notice things slowing down.  Your system has only 8 GB memory, which is enough for Sims 4 but maybe not for Sims 4 plus a music app plus a few browser windows plus the YouTube video in one of those windows.  When the game is loading, or loading a different neighborhood, it's literally loading data from your hard drive into memory.  All the other apps you're currently running will have data stored in memory too.  You could easily be running out of RAM while you're playing.

This doesn't necessarily mean that apps will start crashing—Windows 10 is very efficient at managing memory use.  What it does, when there's not enough RAM for everything, is swap some data to the page file, which is a designated space on your hard drive intended for exactly this overflow.  Windows calculates what really needs to stay in RAM (e.g. the lot currently being simulated as you're playing) and what can be swapped to page file (e.g. that video you were watching ten minutes ago but is currently paused).  When you want to recall some data from the page file, it has to be transferred back to RAM, and something else has to go into the page file.

The issue here is that nothing is faster than RAM, and your hard drive is so much slower that you would definitely notice a delay while a large amount of data is being transferred.  This swap is faster on a solid state drive, but still noticeable under certain circumstances.  Furthermore, no matter how fast your hard drive is, your RAM has a hard cap on available space, so if you're running a lot of apps together, not just that they're open but that you're trying to use them in real time, all those apps might collectively be using more memory than you have installed, leading to a situation where date is constantly being swapped back and forth.  Again, I can't know if this is happening without watching your system in real time, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were.

What you could try, if you wanted, would be installing more memory.  RAM is not so expensive, especially modules that run at a slower speed, as yours might.  You'd want to match the exact specifications of your current memory; the best thing to do would be to find the product number on the RAM stick(s) and try to buy the same thing, or at the very least RAM equivalent in speed and timings.

A solid state drive would speed things up considerably too, not only for swapping to the page file but for loading times in general.  But SSDs are expensive, and you might not want to invest that much money in an older system.  Plus, you'd need to install Windows on the SSD to get the full benefits.

It's not a good idea to mess with the page file settings, unless you understand why you're making the changes.  For example, it's not necessary to increase the size of the page file itself; Windows will increase it as needed, unless you've manually changed the number already.

Or, you could try not running so many apps at the same time.  Minimize what you're not using, or just close the programs; keep an eye on the Task Manager too, and kill any processes using too much memory.  Some websites seem to eat CPU resources as well, for whatever reason, so make sure your browser isn't hogging the processor, and if it is, close tabs as necessary.  It might take some experimenting to figure out a good balance.