Random Crash to Desktop

[Darens-Stuff]

My game has been working the best way it could for the last couple of days with nearly no freezes except Overwatch 3 AM cleaning; however, it started random crashes to desktop today and this last one was totally unnecessary. About 30 minutes after I saved my game, I entered Edit Town to place a community lot and while choosing between two Into the Future lots (it wasn't even CC) the game just crashed.

The game's been performing exceptionally well recently in my Alpine County save even during snow with no FPS drops, so I can't understand how it crashes in Edit Town. Thanks for the help already!

[puzzlezaddict]

@Darens-Stuff  If you look at the crash log, you'll see the game ran out of memory.  This is the relevant section:

Total virtual memory: 4095 Mb
Free virtual memory: 110 Mb

 The "virtual" part is misleading here: Sims 3 is referring to the memory it can use, the total value of which is 4 GB, minus some overhead.  When you consider that the game's memory use can flucutate a bit from one moment to the next, and more than a bit if it's engaged in an intensive task like placing a lot in Edit Town (or saving, or loading CAS, or going through a travel transition), it's easy to see how you'd have hit the RAM limit.

Alpine County is a very large world both generally and in terms of the memory it requires to run.  Many people have found it impossible to keep under the game's RAM limit when playing in the world for any length of time.  One approach is to remove many of the lots and world details, but that kind of defeats the purpose of playing in Alpine County.  Another is to build and create sims in a new save, then save your work to the in-game bin and place it in your existing save as efficiently as possible.

But neither of these fixes the issue, it simply postpones the problem.  If you want to keep playing in Alpine County, you'll need to accept that memory management will always be somewhat of an issue, and get around it by saving often and keeping your play sessions a bit shorter than you might want.  This will become more critical as your save progresses: the longer you play it, the more RAM it will use.

If you want more tips for improving performance, there are lots of good ones here; many but not all are specifically about conserving RAM:

https://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS-FOR-BETTER-GAME-PERFORMANCE

[Darens-Stuff]

   I know where you’re coming from, and I also research a lot to conserve my game performance, but my Alpine County save normally runs using between 2 - 2.5 GB’s of RAM (sometimes even below or a little bit higher). I like to unpark my CPU set Sims 3’s priority to high from Task Manager, and when I do, I see that the game uses more of the CPU, and that might be why the RAM use in such a packed world doesn’t approach 3 GB. I posted the issue because this was clearly a RAM spike, because again, I wasn’t even placing a lot - I was just hovering my cursor over two Community Lots from an Expansion Pack while the game was using around 2.3 GB of RAM.

   My problem is about the random RAM spikes, and I can’t find fixes for that - I just keep wishing to find a way to limit the game’s RAM use to some value like 3.5 GB. The game crashes once it reaches 3.7 GB but still recognizes 4 Gigabytes of VRAM which is super annoying.

[puzzlezaddict]

@Darens-Stuff  The game can't actually use 4 GB of VRAM, only 800 MB.  By that I mean video memory, as opposed to system memory.  The term "virtual memory" is misused by the game here; the important point is that it can only use 4 GB minus some overhead of system memory, since it can only use 2^32 memory addresses.  By the way, the overhead is at least in part due to the cost of translating certain 32-bit instructions for a 64-bit OS: most instructions don't need to be translated at all, but those that do cost extra resources.  The translation process is called thunking.

Anyway, there's nothing you can do to entirely prevent the RAM spikes, and one of these spikes was clearly the issue here.  Whatever the Task Manager was saying at the time, the game ran out or thought it ran out of memory according to its own report.  Maybe it didn't properly release the data for the lots you were checking out; Sims 3 definitely has issues with RAM leaks.  Maybe something else happened in the background.  I don't know that there's any way to tell.  And there certainly isn't a way to force-limit the game's memory use without also causing it to crash when it hits that limit.

[Darens-Stuff]

I see. I also got the RAM and VRAM mixed up while going back and forth to DeviceConfig haha.

Today it did not crash, and the animations became even smoother. It's really unexpected how the game will act, so I guess I will just cross fingers each time.