SIMS2 loading in the middle of a game

[LadFromWales]

Hey all,

I have a system here, a Sempron 2400+ with a whopping 256mb of ram, and a 9700Pro.

When its running the Sims2, it runs it smooth while paused, but it stutters when in game.

When adding/removing items to/from the environment, the screen sometimes goes black, then comes back with a blue screen and the sims loading mouse curser, then the game comes back.

Would lack of available system ram be causing this to happen? I do intend on getting some extra ram for this system (my main machine has 2gb), but I just wondered if thats the reason the Sims2 acts so weird.

Thanks all

 

[LadFromWales]

The game acts the same regardless of whether the settings are on full, or if I turn them down. It still stutters in game.

Would the black out and reloading thing thats happening be due to the game pulling new data onto the ram in order to keep speeds at as high as they can?

 

[LadFromWales]

The computer now has 2 x 512MB sticks of ram.

The screen blanking mid game does seem to have lessened, but it has happened twice in the last 30 mins or so, and again just then. The blanks have got a lot shorter now. They even happen if you just leave the screen paused, doing nothing.

Any suggestions to sort this problem out once and for all?

It runs fine on my laptop, 512MB and Intel Extreme II graphics, but it runs it without blanking, obviously at lower quality etc, as Intel Extreme II sucks!

 

[LadFromWales]

Yep that was it. Before I checked here for replies, I installed the 5.1 Omegas. The VPU recover in that version acted much more violently and painted the screen with loads of crosshatching, then crashed to the desktop and told me that VPU recover had kicked in.

The card was failing to even run for a second at the default 325/310 on ATiTool without artifacts. I removed the stock cooler, and reseated it with a slightly thicker than normal layer of AS5, as because of the 9700Pro's hugely thick shim, the core is too far away from the sink to use a normal layer. This did make the situation better, and the heatsink does feel a lot warmer under load than it did before, and does manage 10-15 minutes of ATiTool without artifacting.

Lowered the GPU/Memory to 275/275 which has pretty much stopped VPU recover kicking in. It still kicked in once, so I removed the side panel, which appears to have sorted it so far.

I'm not sure if this card has had enough now (I bought it 'new' from the bay 2 months ago), but my original 9700Pro was fine with the stock cooler, I just changed it to a silencer because the sink felt too warm in use for my liking. For this interested, that card died while trying to fix a memory stability problem. I held power to switch the machine off, then quickly pressed power again (pc had frozen again, so was annoyed), and the POST was all garbled. Thought woops, turned it on a bit too fast, so switched it off and on again, and it was totally covered with symbols I'd had that card since the days when they cost £220 or so