The Sims 3 lagging on Win 7 but great on Vista

[Guest]

I ran The Sims 3 on the same system using Vista x64 and it would run perfectly smooth. Just like butter, and I thought for once that EA did their job well. Now after upgrading my system from Vista x64 to Win 7 x64, the game runs choppy, extremely choppy. Zooming in and out with the map drops the framerate to 3 sometimes and its deadly.

I have already upgraded the drivers and all and still the game doesn't run fine. I am using the latest S3 patch 1.4. whatever.

My specs are: Q6700, 6GB RAM, 4870 512MB.

The resolution I was running it on before (in Vista) and now is:
1280x1024

Also lowering any of the settings don't work! I tried lowering all the way to LOW all the settings and the resolution to 1024x768, and it doesn't help. Probably added 2-3 frames. So my minimum became 5fps! 😛

 

[The_Prophecy]

I know this may sound obvious, but did you make sure you updated your Catalyst drivers to the latest after installing 7?

 

[JonathanDeane]

Hmmm should work exactly the same or slightly better, did you just upgrade to 7 and left everything on your system?

Some things to try. Uninstall the Sims and try reinstalling it (make sure to back up your game save)

One question, is Sims the only game that is doing that ?

If it is the only one then this may fix the issue, if the answer is no that all your games are doing this then try uninstalling ATI's drivers and reinstalling them too.

The last resort would be a system wipe and a from scratch install of 7.

Upgrades are almost always best done on a freshly wiped HD, anyone know if its possible to install 7 with no key then "upgrade" like you could do with Vista ?

 

[Guest]

Well I have tried the following things:
1. Uninstalling and reinstalling drivers
2. Updating drivers
3. Reinstalling the game
4. Wiping the saves out

These are the obvious things that you try out, I was really psyched about Win 7 and its letting me down so far. Not in terms of other great things that it does (if there are any) but my games lagging? They were 80% of the reason I upgraded to Win 7.

No not all games are doing this. Crysis ran fine and I actually finished that game using my previous save from Vista. Shift is running fine, atleast its the same lags that I encounter as it were in Vista (no performance upgrade) but no downgrade in performance like in Sims 3 where the fps is now reaching an all time low 3-2 fps when zooming in and out by clicking Map (hotkey M).

My Win 7 was a clean install, formatted the drive and installed it. No junk on it when I installed and no junk on it... yet!

I appreciate all your help guys, but I would really like to know if anyone of you have encountered such a strange issue. If Sims 3 was lagging on my system before I would've not cared, guessing its just not meant for my rig. But, lagging now after running fine on Vista is really annoying and is driving me crazy!

 

[buwish]

No, your system should be able to easily handle the sims 3, which is why I can understand that it is a bit irritating to you. One thing that worked for me on the RC, even though I don't play games, was to use the CD that came with the card without updating. The Vista x64 driver maybe worth a shot.

Did you have the video card OC'ed under Vista?

W7 isn't a big resource hog, at least in comparison to Vista, hence why you shouldn't have an issue. Then again, it may be an incompatibility with W7 (the game). Have you tried a right click on the game's icon and run it in say XP or Vista compatibility mode?

Not sure if that will help, but it's worth a shot.