How do I get The Sims 3 to play using Intel's Iris xe graphic card?

[puzzlezaddict]

@mw1525  Yes, that was great, thanks.  In fact, it was more than I felt like I could ask of you, but it's definitely the kind of evaluation I was hoping I'd read.  And it's wonderful to hear your game is running so well on a graphics chip that's a lot more accessible, whether in price or the size and weight of the laptop, than a gaming laptop would be.

If you do happen to see any issues, please let me know, but it sounds like your laptop might be completely fine.

[mw1525]

@puzzleaddict - You are very welcome.

For me, the 'real' moment of truth will come when I add the remaining expansion and stuff packs. For now, all is running smoothly and well. However, if I should run into any hiccups I will definitely post back to get the word out.

Again, thank you for taking the time to help me.

[mw1525]

@puzzleaddict - I have an update as to the performance of the Iris xe card when running the Sims 3. The game still runs well using this card however, there are a few hiccup spots which anyone interested in using this 'card' for the game may want to be aware of. While the game does not truly lag, it does experience moments of brief pauses under certain weather conditions and color combinations.

My Game Changes From Initial Post:
I have added University Life to the game and removed NRaas' Story Progression mod. All other settings are the same.

Differences in Performance: Quick Pauses:
Game performance takes a slight hit when the Fall season begins. Frost, for some reason causes the card to work harder, pc fans comes on but don't overheat my system. The quick pauses (more like a quick 'tick') mainly happens when moving through the world and doesn't affect the animations of the Sims, animals or trees; just how it loads past the 'lot distance'. Otherwise, the Fall season doesn't have an issue. The trees change color and lose leaves all with neither graphic or performance issues in terms of lag or stalls.

I don't know why this is, as there are no issues with snow, hail, heavy rains or, thunderstorms with lightening strikes. But, early morning frost causes a slight (yet noticeable) pause when it comes to loading lots. Sims and animal animations are not altered by the appearance of frost and they play fluidly. It is just the loading of the lots, past the draw distance point which are affected.

Game Performance: Lagging
-Towns/Worlds which are heavily colored in various tones of Green, seem to have moments of actual lagging which have lasted no more than 1-2 seconds. This lag does affect the Sim's animation and it will appear as a jump in motions when it happens. The town of 'Hidden Springs' was where I encountered the most lagging/stalling of the game. Maybe this can be fixed by turning some settings down, truthfully I haven't tried. Other 'Green' worlds such as Riverview did not seem to be affected by this problem under my current settings.

Also, not really certain I can blame this on the card; but it is worth noting. The game spawns too much of everything!

-This is may seem like a minor problem but it is one which is gumming up the routing of my worlds. Because the game will create what it 'thinks' your PC can handle, it has been creating massive multitudes of animals (with litters), gnomes, gems and rocks and even Sims. Because of this, NRaas' Error Trapping mod spends the day unsticking stuck Sims, unrouteable Sims and Sims (or animals) stuck aging. The Sim count for my game is nearing 250 Sims in town (not homeless or visiting)! Sunset Valley alone has over 25 fully grown horses and goodness knows how many foals. Dogs and cats are having many litters and small animals (turtles, snakes, chipmunks, birds....) occupy many footpaths and open areas! Just something to be aware of.

[puzzlezaddict]

@mw1525  Thanks so much for the update.  I don't know enough about how Sims 3 works under the hood to be sure, but it sounds like one of two things may be happening, or perhaps both.  One is that frost takes extra resources to calculate: whether it appears, on what objects, etc.  That would explain the brief pause before the game goes back to running (mostly) smoothly.  The fans coming on also suggests that the processor may be working harder in those moments, although it would take hardware monitoring to confirm.

The other is that it takes more VRAM to render.  Since the game can only use 800 MB, when there's more data that needs to be in video memory, something else has to drop: the game can't hold all the data it wants to use at once.  So the more VRAM the nearby lots and landscape require, the more often the game will need to load and unload data as it switches among them.

This second issue might get better if you lower object and tree detail, but then the game wouldn't look as pretty, and in worlds where the pauses are the only performance issue, it sounds like the tradeoff might not be worth it.

As for Hidden Springs, I wonder whether it uses textures that take more resources to render.  I haven't really played in it myself, although I've loaded it to look around and to test a few things, so I don't really know.  But here again, you could try turning down the settings to see what happens.  If you change one at a time, you might get a better sense of what's causing the problems, for example maybe it's a type of tree that's common in HS and is extra demanding when tree detail is set to the max; or maybe it's the lighting, and in that case you might be able to use a lighting mod to alleviate the issue without lowering any settings.  But it's a lot of work to experiment that much, and I wouldn't blame you if you shrugged and played somewhere else.

As for the animals, the booming population (and accompanying routing errors) would probably drag down performance on any system.  In your position, I'd use NRaas SP to stop immigration and new pets and Register to limit the strays.  If SP is too heavy overall, you could run it on Snail and increase the lengths of the cycles for the various managers even further; I believe the Careers manager is the most demanding.  You could also use igazor's trick of pulling out the fridges in unoccupied houses: sims won't move into a house without one.

[mw1525]

@puzzleaddict - Thanks for responding. And, thank you for the insight into VRAM limitations.

Overall, I am very happy with the way the Iris xe card (if it's really called that) is able to handle the game. My game loads and saves very fast. As I stated, I haven't encountered any major or enjoyment breaking problems.

You may be on to something where Hidden Springs is concerned, that world is packed with trees, densely in some areas. It also is a tall world (if that makes a difference). I will have to play around with it more to get a better feel for what may be happening there.

Where population is concerned, I pulled NRaas' story progression because I wanted to see what the game did on its own. And also, because not everyone reading this will play with mods in their game; so, I wanted my experiences to reflect what happened under normal gameplay conditions. Since I didn't have an issue running SP untuned, I will be putting it back in play once I see how the entire game plays on this integrated card.

In the future, I will this update this thread only if I come across game breaking problems once Island Paradise & Into the Future are installed and played. For now, it handles Base through University Life (with select stuff packs) extremely well.

[Darens-Stuff]

Hello!

   I have just bought a new laptop that has an 11th Gen i5 with Iris Xe GPU, so might I ask for your GraphicsRules and GraphicsCards files to save me from the hassle :P 

[puzzlezaddict]

@Darens-Stuff  The .sgr files are technically program files and as such cannot be shared publically.  If your graphics chip has the exact same device ID as the original poster's does, you can use the same approach I described on page one.  Open deviceconfig.log and look for this section:

---

=== Graphics device info ===
Number: 0
Name (driver): Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics
Name (database): Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics [Found: 1, Matched: 1]
Vendor: Intel
Chipset: Vendor: 8086, Device: 9a49, Board: 0a251028, Chipset: 0001
Driver: igdumdim32.dll, Version: 27.20.100.9365, GUID: D7B78E66-D909-11CF-0D57-412ABAC2D635
Driver version: 9365
Monitor: \\.\DISPLAY1
Texture memory: 1024MB <<OVERRIDE>>
Vertex program: 3.0
Pixel program: 3.0
Hardware TnL: 1

---

You can see the device ID in bold.  If yours matches, go ahead and use the same edits.  If it doesn't match, those edits and the original poster's .sgr files wouldn't help you anyway, but you could substitute your own device ID in the instructions.

[universo220]

Hello!

I have the same graphic card as you (Intel Iris Xe) and I cannot see the grass of the game, just a green spot. I don´t see any number associated with my graphic card, so I guess there is only one Intel Iris Xe. I wonder which code did you used to edit graphicsCards.sgr and exactly where did you placed it as I have already changed graphicrules.sgr following the instructions from this post and it didn´t work. I wonder if there is need of adding more changes in the graphicrules.sgr file and modifing more files that aren´t .sgr.

By the way, I have opened and modified the files using Notepad and then saved them as sgr. The date of modification didn´t changed, but the changes appeared when I opened the files. After opening the game, all my changes have been deleted. If you have found a better program for free, let me know, please.

[puzzlezaddict]

@universo220  Did you repair the game, or did it repair itself, after you made the changes?  Are you saying that the edits to graphicsrules.sgr reverted, or only the other changes you made, and what were those other changes?

Please also go into Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 3, open the file called deviceconfig.log, copy the first 40 or so lines (stop when you get to Options), and paste that info here.  You can delete your computer and usernames, about 20 lines down, but please leave the rest intact.

And let me know what kind of install this is (Origin, disc, Steam, something else) as well.

[universo220]

Thank you so much for answering so fast! I am very grateful. I will respond to your questions:

The game did repair itself after I made those changes. It edited graphicsrules.sgr and graphicscard.sgr. In the last one, I added the name of the graphic card after the list of Intel graphic cards the game supports and a invented number). The number was 0x2994 because it was written after card 0x2993. I may sound dumb, but I hoped it would work. Meanwhile, graphicsrule.sgr was edited using the code of the first page of this post. Any other changes were made. I have used a disk to install the game.