I play on a decent laptop (i7-2630QM 2GHz, GT555m, 8 gigs of RAM, Sims files on an SSD). I know a lot of people frown on using laptops to game and it's not great, but it gets the job done on low settings in many games.
I also like to monitor the system. When I play something demanding like Battlefield 3, I look at the CPU on Resource monitor and graphics card on MSI Afterburner struggling at near 100% usage, and I know the system is taxed to the fullest and this is the best it can do. I don't mind that. Sometimes, I get a badly-optimised yet poor-graphics game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but I see the system resources being fully used and that gets no dissatisfaction from me.
However, when I started playing Sims 3 and the game lagged and stuttered badly, I looked at the system monitors and none of the hardware was even showing any signs of being taxed. The CPU was frequently running at 15-25% with the frequency hovering around 50-60%. The GPU was similarly under utilised at 50% usage with the core clock running well below the max frequency. I still had 3.8GB worth of free RAM. The SSD reported intermittent I/O of a few hundred kilobytes, and never hitting higher than 50% Highest Active Time. The computer wasn't even hot.
Yet the picture menus in Build Mode, CAS and what have you take forever to load, freezing the game while they do, the game stutters badly whenever I move the camera, sometimes the entire game awkwardly hangs for a few seconds while the music and some animations continue to run. I lower the graphics options to the bare minimum without effect. I disable memories. I remove spawns of vampires and the like. Nothing changes. I note that the game has never CTD'ed or stopped working. It just loves to stutter.
I have about ten CC packages, mostly utilities like MasterController and Overwatch (and speaking of which, I have reset Sims/cars/purged the homeless etc. countless times to no avail) and other merged packages of game content. I have identified troublesome packages with the Dashboard and removed them. New games are just as bad as old saves. Caches and DCBackup are also regularly purged.
At this point, having exhausted the optimisation options that I know of, I have come to the conclusion that it's not the system that's being overtaxed (whether due to actual resource demands or glitches/useless cycles of objects getting stuck...), it's that the game is severely under utilising the system. I have not found any solution thus far so if you have a possible solution to this, I would be very grateful.
