Sims 4 - Laptop Performance

[KhaineGB]

Since I've managed to get the game running, I thought I'd post up my laptop's specs and a screenshot of my settings. This is meant as a guide to help other people who may already have a laptop, or are considering buying a laptop, to tweak The Sims 4 for a balance of performance and graphics.

CPU: Intel Core i5-2430M (2.4Ghz, Dual Core)
RAM: 6GB DDR3-1333
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon 6650M (2GB RAM)
O/S: Windows 7 Professional (64-Bit)

Game is installed on a 1tb, 5200rpm drive. Loading is respectable considering the speed of the drive, probably about the same as playing Titanfall or any other modern game. The actual game itself is smooth, responsive and looks fantastic!

Settings.

[Flynn Arrowstarr]

Hi, Khaine.  Considering my laptop was marketed as an entry-level gaming system, I was expecting some lag from the game. I was surprised when I had pretty much no issues running it on Ultra settings with uncompressed textures. I had also maxed edge smoothing.

Laptop specs:

• AMD A10-5757M (2.5 GHz quad-core) with on-die Radeon HD 8650G (256 MB dedicated DDR3)
• Radeon HD 8750M (2 GB dedicated DDR3)
• 1 TB 5400 RPM hard drive
• 1366 x 768 max resolution

I set the laptop's resolution to 1280 x 720 when it's plugged in to my external video capture device. MrsFlynn has the same laptop, though we haven't installed it on her's yet as we need to get the video drivers updated first. Somehow, I was able to update mine to the latest Catalyst 14.4 drivers, but according to AMD's site, the drivers for switchable graphics are supposed to come from the manufacture. Acer's site only has Catalyst 12.10.

By comparison, Sims 3 took forever to load and was laggy during play. FPS was usually around 40 - 50, but it would drop to the low teens when driving around the neighborhood. And this was at medium settings. If you're interested in looking at the system, here's the Amazon link - Acer Aspire V5-552G-X852. My review is at the bottom of the most helpful list (I'm kind of proud of that). It's not offered for sale anymore, that I've found.

Flynn

[KhaineGB]

Mine was considered a "mid-range" laptop in 2012, now it's more like a "low-end" gaming laptop... and despite that, I can still run Sims 4 almost maxed out (I always turn edge smoothing off... I find it tends to eat more resources than necessary for nice graphics... a bit like AA/AF) and I can even play Titanfall on high detail at 720p.

Probably because I'm overclocking the graphics card, though I have tested Sims 4 with that turned off. The settings above still function nicely.

[Flynn Arrowstarr]

I read a post somewhere where someone had overclocked the GPU on my model. The gains were minimal at best, so I haven't bothered. The only stress-tester I haven't tried on this laptop yet is Grand Theft Auto 4. Given how poorly optimized the game is, I figure it will run maybe as well as The Sims 3, heh.

Flynn

[Magpie2012]

OK so I've spoken to Khaine a bit about my new laptop but I was also curious what The Flynn"s would think so here goes:

Lenovo G505
AMD A-Series A6-5200 Quad-Core 2.00GHz
4GB RAM
1TB HDD (I think 5400 rpm)
AMD Radeon HD (8400 I think)
Windows 8.1 SL

Sorry about the 2 "I think"s but my mom has currently absconded with my laptop so I've had to search the web for the specs...
Will This run TS4? And what settings would you suggest? Also what does Quad-Core 2.00GhHz mean? I know its 4 cores but do they operate in parallel or series? Do the 2.00GHz's stack up or is that just the flat rate?


EDIT: Also what is this "overclocking" I hear so much about?

[KhaineGB]

Overclocking is making components run faster than their rated speed.

Example, changing the settings so your CPU ran at 2.5ghz rather than 2ghz... that'd be overclocking. It's not something I recommend doing, especially to a laptop.

[Naria]

Well, it runs weird on my not so spectacular Samsung RV520. Just spent an hour fiddling with the settings because the household was blurry/pixelated (No, not the pixelated pirated copy...), come to find out I switched it to Fullscreen and it was fine. The Windowed mode runs it at 1366x728 instead of 1366x768 and it was making it all compressed funny. Silly game.

So, uh, heads up to anyone with laptops with that resolution. 

Now to see how it runs otherwise.

[KhaineGB]

That's normal if your laptop has an LCD instead of an LED monitor.

LCD's don't like running at resolutions lower than their native one... it makes things blurry.

[Flynn Arrowstarr]

OK so I've spoken to Khaine a bit about my new laptop but I was also curious what The Flynn"s would think so here goes:

Lenovo G505
AMD A-Series A6-5200 Quad-Core 2.00GHz
4GB RAM
1TB HDD (I think 5400 rpm)
AMD Radeon HD (8400 I think)
Windows 8.1 SL

Sorry about the 2 "I think"s but my mom has currently absconded with my laptop so I've had to search the web for the specs...
Will This run TS4? And what settings would you suggest? Also what does Quad-Core 2.00GhHz mean? I know its 4 cores but do they operate in parallel or series? Do the 2.00GHz's stack up or is that just the flat rate?


EDIT: Also what is this "overclocking" I hear so much about?

Hi, magpie2012.

The laptop specs are within range for The Sims 4, except for the graphics. The only reason I say that is the graphics chip is on the processor and has no internal memory of its own. The game should run, but it may not run with more than low - medium settings.

As for the processor, quad-core 2.0 GHz means there are four distinct cores, each running at 2.0 GHz. The game uses two of those cores in tandem to run, so the other two are somewhat free to work on other things. On my laptop, with the game, the Origin client and Firefox running (aside from the normal Windows 7 stuff) it's consuming 4.03 GB total memory. This is based on a quick informal analysis of the game running in Windowed mode with the Task Manager open displaying CPU activity. It is not a formal analysis by any means.

I would see about maxing the memory in it to 8 GB, only because the game, the shared graphics memory and Windows will quickly max out the 4 GB memory in the system and will be constantly swapping to the hard drive. This will increase the loading times in the game and could potentially slow down the game to some degree. By maxing out the memory it shouldn't need to swap to the drive as much and should help the loading times and make the game run a little smoother.

Hope this helps and happy Simming!

Flynn

[Magpie2012]

Thanks Flynn and Khaine for explaining the nitty gritty to me uhm I've used a 16GB flash drive to readyboost my laptop to 8GB, is that okay? I should be getting TS4 sometime around month end *holding thumbs* but affording extra memory right now is waaaay out of budget.

[KhaineGB]

I honestly have no idea how well that'll work.

I've never used readyboost, so it could work great... or it could be absolutely terrible.

[heather9587]

Since I've managed to get the game running, I thought I'd post up my laptop's specs and a screenshot of my settings. This is meant as a guide to help other people who may already have a laptop, or are considering buying a laptop, to tweak The Sims 4 for a balance of performance and graphics.

CPU: Intel Core i5-2430M (2.4Ghz, Dual Core)
RAM: 6GB DDR3-1333
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon 6650M (2GB RAM)
O/S: Windows 7 Professional (64-Bit)

Game is installed on a 1tb, 5200rpm drive. Loading is respectable considering the speed of the drive, probably about the same as playing Titanfall or any other modern game. The actual game itself is smooth, responsive and looks fantastic!

Settings.

I wonder how that is going to run the game once we start getting expansions.. and for the guy who said the sims 3 was laggy, yeah... the sims 3 was super laggy, completely different architecture, but right now the sims 4 has very very little on terms of functionality going on. There were about a million hobbies in TS3, just so many possibilities for what you could do, and right now we are in a very limited base game stage.

I was running TS3 on a bootcamped MacBook Pro, and it was awful. Apple ended up busting it during a repair and ended up giving me a better one as a replacement, after I ordered a PC finally. I FINALLY got an Alienware 17 from costco for a crazy good deal.

I run my game at 1920x1080p which is my screen resolution, all settings as high as possible, and my load screens are about 10 seconds and that's it, if that long. Response times are incredible but for reference I can also now run TS3 on ultra settings complete with a detailed lot depth of 8 and reflections of "mirrors and super water" and on my old computer I could not play the game with all expansions installed and it had to be on low settings except for the textures and sims because I'd rather deal with the lag than blurry sims. I didn't even know what the advanced rendering and whatnot checkboxes did, but now I do!

I'm wondering how things will go with this over time... but if I can run TS3 with absolutely no lag, ALL store content, tons of CC etc... ultra settings.. I'm not worried unless they keep messing up the programming. Right now the "testingcheats" won't stay on if you leave your lot. That makes me angry as all get out. You also can't graft plants now. I could yesterday.

Specs:

Alienware 17
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Intel(R) Core (TM) i7-4910MQ CPU @ 2.9GHz (8 CPUs), ~2.9GHz
32 GB RAM
Intel Graphics 4600 - 1920 x 1080
Nvidia GeForce GTX 880M with 8 GB memory
2 TB Raid 0 Harddrive
80GB SSD Harddrive for booting