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[esperelda]

Actually I realized when turning the game on today that I hadn't typed "on" in cheat mode just "fps" so with "fps on" the numbers appeared in the upper right corner in a range of 30s (lowest) to 180s (highest). When in pause mode the numbers went lower towards 30 and back in play mode they went up again. I think in worldview mode they were around 80s. Is this a good sign?

[puzzlezaddict]

@esperelda  It's sort of a good sign in that you're mostly getting good performance.  It's best to manually cap fps though: your graphics card won't have to work as hard, it'll generate less heat, and you'll avoid some of the screen tearing and other graphics glitches that can happen at excessively high framerates.  And your monitor can't display more than 60 frames a second anyway, so anything above that is noise and excess workload.

I believe you should be able to cap fps using the Radeon control panel.  Right-click on the desktop and select AMD Radeon Settings, click the Gaming header, and click on Sims 3 if you see it.  (If you don't see it, click the three dots in the upper right corner, select Add a Game, and choose TS3 for an Origin install or TS3W for a disc or Steam install.)  Within the Sims 3 settings, enable Radeon Chill and set both the min and max FPS to 60.  Turning on Radeon Enhanced Sync may also help performance.

If you notice your screen or your menus turn purple at some point, open the Control Panel, click the Display header, and enable Custom Color.  Then change the Hue setting to something else.  You can change it back, or disable Custom Color; the point is that this resets the distorted colors.

[esperelda]

I was able to cap fps to 60 min and max in Radeon chill. When I played the game for a little over an hour the fps would still shoot pretty high, reaching into the 100s. As I looked for a sim in Master Controller the fps did go down to 60s but back in game play it went pretty high again. Maybe re-starting the computer after setting the fps cap and before playing the game could've helped.

[puzzlezaddict]

@esperelda  Restarting may or may not help, but if it doesn't, you can try using RivaTuner Statistics Server instead.  It's a free download and doesn't use much in the way of resources, and I've never heard of it not working unless someone accidentally closed it before playing.  (It does need to be running while you play, but you can minimize it to the system tray.)

RTSS is available here:

https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/rtss-rivatuner-statistics-server-download.html

The real download is towards the bottom of the page; avoid any ads you see towards the top.  Download the recommended version 7.3.1, not the beta, install it, and when it opens, you'll see this:

Click the green Add button at the bottom, add TS3.exe for an Origin install or TS3W.exe for a disc or Steam install, set the "Framerate limit" (red box) to 60, and choose whether or not to let RTSS start with Windows (yellow box).  Either way works; letting it start with Windows ensures you won't forget to open it before playing.  Then restart your computer.

If you see a purple hue, use the same fix I described before.

[esperelda]

Are you able to look at these attachments and see what I'm seeing?

[esperelda]

Attachment (it seems like I have to type something in order for the attachment to go through. I don't know  any other way besides attachments to show what I'm looking at.)

[esperelda]

I downloaded from the bottom of the guru site like you said except there wasn't a 7.3.1 but a 7.3.1 Final (Recommended) and by the time it downloads onto my computer it says 7.3.2 beta. I'm hoping so very hard that one of the pics I attached isn't a virus of some sort, it is a webpage that says guru 3D and has a lot of ads on it. I've unzipped before so don't know what is going wrong. 

[esperelda]

I haven't at all seen that pic you posted on what it is supposed to look like after opening the download.

[puzzlezaddict]

@esperelda  Right-click on the .zip file and select Extract, then run the RTSSSetup.exe that gets extracted.  The second screenshot shows the contents of the .zip file.

It looks in your second screenshot like you did in fact get th version 7.3.1, but it's not that the beta would be terrible; it's just not guaranteed to be stable, so don't worry about that either.  And yes, the file in your second screenshot is the correct one, not a virus.

[esperelda]

When you say right click on the zip file, you mean the 2nd listing in the 2nd attachment that says "RTSSSetup731.exe" ? When I right click on it there isn't any option to extract so I click on the extract icon in the row at the top of the box, it is between the green add and blue V test icons. When clicking the extract at the top of the box, it says "Destination folder already contains processed file. Would you like to replace the existing file with this one?" But those two files look exactly the same so I don't know what else to do but answer "yes" and it doesn't seem that would be anything different and I still won't be able to open and use the RTSSS.