Sims 3 is too slow and always crashes

Question

I have a desktop computer whose CPU is Core i5-2500 @3.3GHz, Graphic card is NVIDIA Quadro 600. It has 8GB RAM but only 3.24GB usable because the OS is 32bit Windows 7. Is my system not enough to play Sims 3?

It's University Life expansion pack.(build 8.1) It took 3 minutes to show the icon 'Buy a household' then took another 5 minutes filling the progress bar while loading the game. Is it normal?

What's even worse is, every time it crashes within 15 minutes. What's wrong?

How long does it take to start the game for you guys?

Answer 1

That should be completely efficient enough to play sims 3: The system requirements are as follows:

• 2.4GHz p4 processor
• 1.5GB Ram
• 128 Mb video memory with pixel shader
• At least 6.1GB storage

Ensure that all drivers are completely up to date and that your video card drivers are installed. As suggested by ian__escobar, this may be a general problem. Attempt to play in low resolution.

Also make sure you have enough room on your hard drive, as this may also slow things down and ensure there are minimal processes running in the background.

Answer 2

Your computer is TOO good for the game. (the ram amount is fine as unless you invest HEAVILY in custom content mods, even with all expansions you'll never touch more then 2 gb of ram).

You need to get a FPS Limiter and cap it at 30 fps. It's not in the slightest optimized to run at higher then 30 fps, and while it can do so, it actually causes the game to perform worse the better your PC is, especially if your computer is strong enough to run at 700+ FPS which can and will cause the game and possibly the whole PC to crash from overworking your video card trying to run at 3k+ fps constantly.

Enabled V-sync via your card's control panel (or via a 3rd party utility) can help stop the crashing as it'll at least cap the FPS to around 60 or 120 (or whatever your monitors refresh rate is) the game will still run like crap unless you drop it down to 30 fps maximum.

As for loading, it depends on the world. Some worlds try to pre-load buildings from other expanions and this causes world generation to take longer then a world that already has most of those buildings included (sunset valley takes the longest to load if you have all expansions due to having to add so much stuff).

You can speed that up a lot by making a clean save of every world (just load the world and then save) and then use Save As to seperate your other saves off of it.

Answer 3

the sims is a really big game with all the expansions and dlc's and on my previous system i had the sims 3 with 6 expansion kits, it became pretty slow and caused my system to crash. then i read an article online... so there are 2 options here you either play it at low resolution and step down the settings a bit for faster game-play but with weak graphics or you play it normal and wait...but you can be assured that what happens to you is pretty normal.