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I tried to install Sims 3 on a new Lenovo Thinkpad. The specs are Win 7 64-bit, 6GB RAM, 500GB HDD, Radeon HD6630m gfx card. The driver for the graphics card is the latest.
When I try to play, the Sims' faces have huge artifacts on them, and it looks like fractured glass sticking out in crazy directions. Is this a graphics card problem?
Daniel Gratz
Posted 2011-07-09T13:22:31.930
Reputation: 581
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You can't rule out that the graphics card is damaged/faulty, but, if you do not have any other problems in other games, I would try the following:
After this, it is either the game is simply not compatible with your card or the card is faulty.
William Hilsum
Posted 2011-07-09T13:22:31.930
Reputation: 111 572
the laptop has switchable graphics, when i select the power saving intel gpu, sims works fine. When i change back to the Radeon, the artefacts appear. Does this mean the graphics card has problem? Is there any tool i can run to check if the grahpics card is ok? – Daniel Gratz – 2011-07-09T14:12:58.143
Im running a tool called ATItool, it has a spinning furr ball thing. The fps when i select the power saving gpu are 171 average. When i tell the laptop to use the high performance gpu for it, there is zero performance change (the fps remain average 171). I would expect there to be quite a big increase in fps if the ati gpu were working. – Daniel Gratz – 2011-07-09T14:25:30.270
@Daniel Gratz Based on the large number of problems people have out there, I do not believe that your card is damaged. It may, or may not, be resolved by some setting in your card's properties. – KCotreau – 2011-07-09T15:05:19.060
ok, well it seems i have to restart atitool after changing between gpu's. I get a 2x increase in fps with the high performance card so it must be at least doing something. Probably it's just the game. I installed that directx package you sent me a link to and didn't help. – Daniel Gratz – 2011-07-09T15:12:05.877
I would try installing DirectX 9 (It will not mess with your current DirectX, only add to it). That is a system requirement, and may be related. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=35 If this works, please post back, and I will move it to the answers so you can check it. For now, it is kind of a wild guess. Your hardware otherwise meets the system requirements very easily.
– KCotreau – 2011-07-09T13:35:12.897Also, does the program have any updates you can install? There are a lot of people out there having trouble with graphics and Windows 7 with this game, so maybe they released a patch. You might also try disabling features in the graphics card control panel app. – KCotreau – 2011-07-09T13:38:54.937
What processor are you using also? There are apparently known issues with AMD also. – KCotreau – 2011-07-09T13:41:16.933
thanks for the replies, i will try installing dx9, its a core i3 processor. – Daniel Gratz – 2011-07-09T13:51:51.123