CRASH TO DESKTOP - Possible Solution

Writin_Reg wrote:Hmmm, well that stumps me, as I have no clue other than perhaps you need to file an actual ticket requesting help from EA technicians with this issue because you defintely have the machine to play the game. I had weird crashes up until I uninstalled the download manager after updating to the newest patch and that seemed to stop mine. I'm running an 64 bit AMD Phenom Quad core with 6 gig of ram and a Nvidia Geforce 9400 with one gig of ram on it and like you had CTD at all kinds of random places. I noticed they got even more frequent after the EADM updated and it was suggested to me to remove the DM which stopped most of the crashes. Then when the patch came out and I installed that, then again deleted the EADM, I haven't had any further crashing. I also noticed the VM usage has improved drastically after I removed the EADM. Which to me makes little sense, but it is so.

So I think you should just try hounding EA to give you some answers though, as there is no way your pc should suffer this kind of craziness.

I believe it is the amount of cores he is using. I have seen many others that have more than two cores and the specs are good and they report the same problem. I believe it is a core utilization problem. If you are using a CPU with more than two cores Sims 3 may not know how to handle the processing.

I remember you from last night. Your specs are good and I still think it is a core problem. Sims 3 may not be able to handle more than two cores correctly and I believe EA probably never tested Sims 3 on a Quad core and above. I may be wrong but I have a strong hunch that may be the problem. I wias I had a quad core so I can test my theory. Most games have not yet been tweaked to utilize multi-core processors and Sims 3 may be one of them.

The above sounds plausible to me. I kinda wish I had a quad so I could test it myself but I don't... yet. There's a guy on the Mac side with two Xeon "Woodcrest" (so effectively four cores total but the game might only be using 1 CPU for him... I'm just guessing) he hasn't reported any crashing though.

That may be since most of the crashes we hear about here on machines that have seemingly great specs are more than two cores. And sligly less frequently on dual core machines. Rarely do we see a single core crash that cannot be easily solved.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 08/02/09 10:40 PM

the core issue may be a contributor, but not fully. Another person i know has a quad core and it runs fine with no crashes.

Here is what I am discovering:

The maximum HIGH DETAILED LOTS when stepped down from MAX (as you would think a quad-core with two extremely high end GTX295 1798mb graphics cards could handle) it reduces the crashing.

I reduced HIGH DETAILED LOTS from 12 (max) to 8 and no crash to desktop except every now and then on a save, so I reduced it to 6 (even less crashing) and finally 4 and so far (and I emphasize "so far") no random crashes to desktop or crashes (or even ERROR 12 or 13) since.

I am not going to rush out the door and scream from the highest rooftop yet, but I will play at this setting and see if it still crashes.

Now, I also uninstalled EADM, per Writin_Reg's post, but I noticed I still crashed until I started throttling back the maximum number of high rendered lots.

It appears that EA may have over estimated it's maximum settings or wrote the code to not support high end multi-threading CPU and/or GPU processors like the ones I am using. The Intel i7 975 processor uses four cores and eight parallel threads, and I see TS3 using all eight parallel threads at some times (it especially likes thread #8 on the fourth core)

But still, it crashes to the desktop when the maximum high rendered lots is set to max. This only happens on lots that are in a densely populated area of the map or when I visit downtown, but not on lots that are on the outskirts. I can play those lots with the max rendered lots set to max, but of course there are no lots close by to render.

Try it and see if it helps, if you have crash to desktop and ERROR 12/13 save errors with a crash.

We're still just paying beta testers, one month into this game

and that makes me very unhappy.

Hey Writin_Reg, good to see you. I took your advice awhile back and bought the same card as you...and glad to say that with your advice and all....I have had no problems....till the new patch gave me sound issues....my sims sound muffled and like sometimes I had no sound in build and buy mode and the sometime did have sound, now I have nothing...any wisdom on this?

Ok, news from the Mac side. There's a guy over there running Dual 3.2GHz Quad-core Xeon, 16GB ram and a Quadro FX.
His only problem following the 1.3 patch is the most expensive desk not rendering correctly.

My game crashes to the desktop ALL the time when I try to save and I am SO sick of it. I can't even play b/c I don't know if it's going to save or not. What's the point in playing the Sims if you can't save your game? I save it once or twice while playing and the next time I try to save...... it crashes to the desktop. Does anyone know what to do? I sent EA my dx diag and I have already tried uninstalling the game.

Foypants21,

I am pleased to report that setting my HIGH DETAIL LOTS number to 4 instead of something higher ended my crashes to the desktop and save errors crashing also.

I hope this works for you also, because i have been stressing about this for over a month. TODAY, I actually played the game for several hours, hopping all over the city from one house to the next, downtown, uptown and everything in between and not one crash!

Before setting high detail lots to 4 i was crashing every 30-45 minutes or as soon as I went downtown or played a house in a high density residential area. now - not a single crash.

I also uninstalled EADM, but I am not yet sure if that was contributing to the problem.

Set you high detail lots to 4 (REGARDLESS HOW POWERFUL YOUR COMPUTER) and tell us how it went.

Thank you, I tested this and you are correct. Mine does not crash at all nor have any errors or major glitches at 4 or fewer high detail lots. At 5-6 I get errors 12 and 13 at 7 I got 15 mins the soft crash. at 8 hard crash as soon as I entered live mode.

So even specs don't seem to matter that much as long as you have what it takes to run the game. At only 1 high lot, I lose the hesitation when sims change outfits and such, at 2 that is there but only 10-15 seconds, at 4 it's 30 seconds.

So it seems EA built the max values for only the 2000.00 plus custom amchines and the rest of us have to turn things down a bit. Oh well, I always kept it on 3 lots before testing your theory, which I'd say is very plausible and highly probable.

I set my high detail lots to 2 and it didn't crash for about 3 hrs and then i had to quit playing and watch a show. So it did work after, we will see if it stays like this. If this is the case then maybe EA can fix this problem.

This seems to be the solution - this thread should be made a sticky or post the results of what was discovered and make that post a sticky, because there are many who are crashing to desktop and are entirely frustrated with no results - THIS SEEMS TO WORK 100%.

I played today for about 20min and it crashed, it seems to be a temporary fix for me I don't know why. EA please fix this crash.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 08/04/09 07:05 AM

Nevermind

I have the Helper Monkey and no crashes (except when I tested the high detail lot setting) so it isn't that.