*Sorry for the inevitable formatting errors, I've been trying to fix this for days and I'm too exhausted to care right now*

I just got a new Alienware 16X Aurora with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 GPU with 8GB of RAM and I've been working on getting The Sims 3 (through the EA app) set up on it, everything was going well until I tried installing the LazyDuchess smooth patch.

Every time I would either try to load an existing save or start a new one it'd immediately give me the error and go back to the main menu. I tried various solutions but after continuous failure, I resolved to forgo the smooth patch, reinstalled the game, and it was working again. However, I was really bothered by how tiny the UI is at this laptop's resolution, so I installed Just Harry's tiny UI fix, only for the same thing to start happening again.

Here is a list of everything I tried:

- Clearing The Sims 3's cache files

- Clearing the EA App's cache files

- Disabling my anti-virus

- Disabling OneDrive

- Turning off Read-Only in my EA files properties

Both the smooth patch and the UI fix edit/add files in the game's directory, there was one last thing I did that's convinced me that's what's causing all of this, I followed the Carl's Sims 3 Guide tutorial on how to get the game to recognize my graphics card, and it was giving me the error again! At this point I was so fed up that I reinstalled for the third or fourth time and downloaded all my mods and CC without touching the directory. The game loaded right up and is working, but the graphics are horrible due to my unrecognized GPU.

I'm so frustrated!

Apologies if this post is in the wrong category, I've never uploaded anything on here before. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Good luck with this game, I hope someone who hasn't given up can help you.

Right, I'm lucky it's running at all! The only plus of the graphics refusing to work is that it's giving me a nice, consistent framerate

I think it's almost better to have a good frame rate than good graphics. Anyway, I can't play it in rotation without the neighborhoods becoming completely unplayable before the second generation. And I hate playing with just one family, so why do I want an open world? So I'm giving up on this game; it doesn't run on either laptop or desktop. lol