FPS below 10 with i7 and gtx 960m

[2a799fb82e6e10d5]

I installed the game on my laptop thinking it would run smoothly, since I have an i7 4720HQ and a gtx 960m.
Imagine my surprise when I saw the FPS locked at 17 in full screen and 7 (7!) in boderless window. To top it off the game seems to only use 20-30% from 2 of my 8 cores, and only about 50% of the GPU, so I really cannot begin to fathom what is going on.

All other games are working perfectly fine (I can play Madden 19 on high settings and get 60 FPS), I have tried reinstalling the game twice already, I have performed a clean installation of the geforce drivers, I really, really, really don't know what to think. This is ridiculous.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

[2a799fb82e6e10d5 · Accepted solution]

Oh. My. God.

Since I had already turned off all the "online features" in the game options to no avail, I decided to go route one and turn on airplane mode.

40 FPS on ultra settings. cpu 30% gpu 60%.

I am speechless. Still, both the cpu and gpu are underloaded and a normal, decently coded game should push at least 60fps, but I can live with 40 after all this hassle.

Thanks a lot to everyone who helped guys

[jpkarlsen]

You do not have enough free space on your C; drive for temporary files. This is because you have partitioned your SSD in two small partitions. This will seriously affect performance of your SSD and shorten its lifespan. You need to create more free space on C: so I suggest that you undo the partitioning.

[2a799fb82e6e10d5]

I have approximately 8GB free, why would that not be enough for the sims but more than enough for much more demanding games?
Not arguing, just wish to make sure that is the issue here before I go about unpartitioning my drive and all that for nothing.

P.S. I also get 10 FPS during the loading screen on startup, and 17 in the game menu. The game never goes over 19-20 FPS.

[jpkarlsen]

Both Windows and the game makes temporary files. The other Game you mention may be more heavy on Graphics but do not need as much in temporary space.

[2a799fb82e6e10d5]

I cleared some space and I checked how much drive space vas used. Upon launching the game the free space on the C drive went from 8.91 GB to 8.86 GB and then to 8.81 GB in live play.

The game never went over 17 FPS. The graphic settings are automatically set as "high". Playing on ultra settings in full hd or on lowest settings and 1024x768 resolution produced absolutely no difference in FPS whatsoever.

[jpkarlsen]

Make sure that the game runs on the GeForce card not the builtin Intel Graphics.

[Phantomlover1717]

To add, link on how to do that: https://sims4.crinrict.com/en/2014/09/graphics-cardintel-chip-dual-systems/

[2a799fb82e6e10d5]

Yeah that's the first thing I checked, as that is usually the problem when launching a newly installed game.
I would expect 15 FPS while using the integrated graphics, but I would expect more than that in 1024x768, even with an integrated gpu.

Whatever I do, the FPS stays exactly the same while the cpu and gpu utilisation never goes over40-50% (with chrome and other stuff open as well)

[Player_qe38v2wp]

may be a ram issue. are you sure no other program is running in the back that hugs all the resources? are you sure the gtx is the graphics card the game is using and not the onboard one?

[2a799fb82e6e10d5]

In the screenshot I attached you can see I have 20% cpu usage, 50% nvidia gpu usage (integrated gpu is idling), 3 GB of ram available, yet the game is running at 9 FPS.
It is definitely not a hardware issue. In the last few days I have played Madden 19, Stellaris, Cities skylines, Kingdom come deliverance... all titles that are way more demanding, with normal 30-60 FPS.