(edit 09/21/2023): LD's Smooth Patch was causing the massive spike in CPU usage. I thought I had tested my game without mods entirely, but I forgot to delete the bin files for the patch! Thank you to everybody that helped!

Hello! I'm running into an issue I've never encountered before, and I'm not sure if it's just incompatibility with modern hardware or what's going on, but I've seen a lot of people with very similar setups to mine run TS3 perfectly with fixes/patches/mods of that nature, so I'm pretty confused and would like some help if at all possible.



Lately when I run TS3, it takes up, on average, about 80% of my CPU. Last night and today, I noticed it even crawl up to 90%. When this happens, not only does my PC start to freak out, but my game also slows to a complete crawl. It'll stutter and freeze (the application itself doesn't freeze, but the game gets stuck while the trees and water stay moving) for ages. Last night, it stayed stuck for half an hour till it finally let me save and quit. I play the Steam version with every EP/SP (barring Katy Perry, thanks Steam), and have for the past couple of years. I haven't played my game in about a year however due to hardware issues, but now that I have a fully upgraded setup, I've been giving it a try again. Somehow, my CPU usage was nowhere near this high on my old hardware, which consisted of a Radeon RX590 and subpar cooling.

I do use mods, to clarify, but a small amount that primarily consists of fixes from LazyDuchess and NRaas, CleanUI, some CAS stuff, and some texture overrides. 6.83 GB total, which may seem like a lot, but it's actually the lowest amount I've ever had for TS3 in my decade+ of playing this game. I have tested my game without any mods other than the following,



and I'm still getting the exact same CPU usage. I also do use Reshade, but I've noticed no change after turning it off. I've done just about everything I can find online, including limiting FPS & turning on VSync in the Nvidia Control Panel, disabling fullscreen optimization (I play in borderless windowed mode), cleaning cache after every session (I use Regul Save Cleaner), bypassing the launcher, deleting the whole documents folder to let it regenerate, even uninstalling & reinstalling, you name it. Nothing I've done has made it any better and I've been troubleshooting for over a day now. I'm not even crashing either, it's just this scary CPU usage that I can't find a cause for. My specs are:

OS: Windows 10
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 32 GB
and I've got AIO liquid cooling from Corsair too.

Here are my game settings as well (pardon the font size!):



I'm also completely offline, I have tried turning memories off & using a mod to limit memories, and I don't have lessons or interactive loading screens enabled. Any sort of advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

Adding onto my original thread with some more info,



Curiously enough, this is how TS3 runs while I'm in CAS, mods included and everything. I'm just a little baffled by all this!

How big are your saves? If your saves are huge ( more than a gig) save cleaner isn't going to help much.

How many sims do you have in the world you're playing? By that I mean total sims: role sims, tourists if allowed, playables, ect. The more sims you have, the more resources are being used.

Do you play with horses? They get stuck pretty much everywhere which leads to more lag.

Do you play Island Paradise or a custom world with houseboats? If so, did you remove the houseboats?

Do you clean out sims' inventories?

Do you use NRAAS Traveler? Acottonsock did a video about using NRAAS Porter vs NRAAS Traveler and what they do to save sizes. If you don't do this, ignore it unless you're interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBCdvpzL8wY

Have you tried playing without Lot Population?

Almost 7 gigs of content is a lot for the game to load all at once. I'm not going to sit here and tell you to remove it, but if you have a lot of sims, big, bloated save files and so on, your game is going to struggle regardless of hardware. The game is capped to use just under 4 gigs of RAM. There is no way to make it use more.

Other than the following?

Why not just test without any mods whatsoever?

As a sidenote, I read that some Lazy Duchess mods conflict with NRAAS mods. If I'm reading those screenshots correctly, it seems you have both.

Right now, I only have one save and it is 42.6 MB. I have one playable sim, but according to NRaas Master Controller, in my world, there are 81 residents, 91 service sims, and 18 tourists. Not sure if it makes a difference knowing this, but I'm playing in Riverview Reimagined. My game does the same CPU thing even in the main menu though, as well as in other worlds before even creating a household, so I'm not sure if it'd be a world causing this or not. Wouldn't be surprised, knowing TS3, but still.

I don't have horses in my active household, but I do allow one wild horse in my world. I have I think NRaas Overwatch? Or Master Controller, set to allow one of each wild animal in the game. I do have Island Paradise installed, but I don't actively play with it because of all the lag. I do clean out my playable sim's inventory regularly, and I have NRaas Traveler installed, but I haven't used it at all since I haven't had a need to. I also tried playing without Lot Population this morning and still ran into the same issue.

I agree that 7 GB of mods isn't very small at all for a game like this, but the part that confuses me is that the game is still acting this way even without mods. I double-checked that too this morning just to be extra sure. Even just during the intro, it's reaching 84% CPU use. I feel like there's something I've done wrong trying to optimize it? Because I haven't come across anyone who has this specific issue before. I really don't know what I could've bungled though, since I've watched dozens of guides (acottonsock's guides included!) on how to spruce up TS3 and I've done everything exactly as explained.

Thank you for your response! I appreciate it a lot.

You can try looking here, as well.... https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical...-3/td-p/7817071

I should've specified in the original post that I've tested without mods entirely, I even double-checked it without mods this morning, but I forgot while I was rushing out the door for work! And then totally forgot after work lol. Sorry about that. But, even without mods, I'm still getting crazy CPU usage.

I didn't actually know about LD and NRaas mod conflicts! Thank you for telling me. I'll mess around and see what works and what doesn't.

Thank you for your response!

I tried what this thread suggests a couple days ago, but it hasn't made any sort of difference since I'm not playing in fullscreen mode.

Thank you for your response!

Okay, I feel like a massive bozo. I said I tried without any mods at all, but it completely skipped my mind to delete the rest of the Smooth Patch files in the bin folder. I'm so sorry to everybody that responded!! But, after removing LD's Smooth Patch, the CPU load has dropped to about 10% average. I'm gonna bring this up in the LD modding discord since it's such an extreme jump, but regardless, that's the solution! I am so sorry again, but very very grateful for the people that took time out of their day to respond. Thank you!!

It is appreciated that you posted what fixed your problem. Now, anyone else with the same issue might fix it from your find!

I heard that the newer LD Smooth Patch has problems. It was recommended to go back to v1.0 in a few other threads. Seems to have worked for me.