Make sure your RAM and GPU are accurately identified. So what you need to do is to find out what causes your game to struggle.įirst things I would check it seems that you have already done- set the graphics rules file so that the game knows what hardware you have. The GPU is working fine, but the rest of the computer can't find the information to send to it. So the computer has nothing to show me- the game responds by giving the display some flashing pink, without the animations. Otherwise things take longer, which is when you get lagging, and you also get bottlenecks (when one bit of the computer works slower than the other)- and this is when I see pink flashing, when there isn't enough RAM to get the texture information to the GPU. So, having optimal CPU useage is important too, as well as having lots of free RAM. But, this uses CPU power and GPU power too, as the computer needs to process the information to get it in and out of memory. This is called 'paging' or 'swapping' or 'virtual memory'. Later, when there is some free memory, it will access that page file and read that information to memory.
It does this when it does not have enough memory free to use. In the same way, Windows writes down memory information in a page file, onto the hard disk. Windows (under default conditions) uses a page file to manage memory this is like having a notepad by your side as you are doing something- when someone tells you their phone number in a conversation, you write it down, and then later, you put that written down number back in your memory when you think about it to dial it. I use a startup script for the game to do this. If these graphs show too much load on one or more cores, I start to get lagging as the computer cannot process the game data. My computer has two cores (four hyperthreads) as it's old and low powered so if I'm running a browser and the game simultaneously, I can set the game to use a specific core(s), that way the load is more balanced. If I wasn't so miserly I would have built another computer for Sims, but this one still works and he is part of the family! ) (Please don't laugh at my Sims computer, he was built by me a decade ago with cheap parts and he has performed admirably, I had to buy him a new CPU fan a few months ago but he is still going. As you can see I still have some free memory to work with. If your memory fills up, the game will lag and possible crash as it does not have the resources to continue. If you click on the memory tab you should see something like this: There are a number of ways to run this, one is to right click the taskbar and open task manager, then on the performance tab click 'resource monitor'. Have a look at resource monitor whilst you run your game.