More Awesome Than You!

Hello, I would like to tweak my in game graphics settings in order to hopefully prevent a little choppiness. Right now all my settings are on high and I have an ATI Radeon X700 256MB; 1000MB RAM. I don't want to touch the graphics card settings themselves, just the in game sims settings. Where is the best place to begin? With smooth edges? With shadows? I am wanting to do as little as possible and do it gradually in order to see a gradual improvement. I like to have the mirrors reflect since its more realistic but maybe I don't need all the shadow detail. Any opinions? Thanks, Tracy

I agree -- shadows are the things I miss least.  So I've got those way down or off and everything else cranked to the max.

I tend to have the texture and shadow settings to medium, just because I prefer the look better. All other setting are on high. I don't know if it will affect the choppiness in your game though. My game runs just fine. :)

Shadows definitely is the first thing to turn off. They're not realistic anyway.

A HUGE step can be turning down your res on notch. I went from 1280x960 to 1152×864 some time ago and it really sped up my game, even more than turning all settings to medium or low on the higher res did.

Thanks so much for the advice people. My resolution is already at 1024x768 not sure I want to go to 800x600. I have set my shadows to 'off' and my texture detail and graphics effects to medium. Seems a bit smoother now and I will see how it goes.

This site: http://tg.sims2techguide.net/index.php has information on the graphic options and how tweaking them will affect performance. According to the site, turning down the level of detail will have the most dramatic effect on performance.

turning the game down to 800x600 isn't that bad. every mode is shown bigger. Bigger pictures in storymode, bigger views of items and more details in buy mode etc. the only irk is the bar takes up 1/3 the screen and the in-window camera takes up another 1/5 space.

If you have things the way you like to see it and it is still choppy, change the way you play.  Keep your lots small and simple and don't clutter, the fewer objects the faster the lot will run.

This is harder to do, but make sure you are not using custom objects, clothing, or hair with meshes that contain a large number of polygons.

Edit: I dug up my notes from when I tuned my game.  I have an X800.  Setting the Lighting and Graphic Effects to High was a waste.  I have both at Medium.   The difference is not important to me and it did have a small impact on FPS.  I have shadows off because I found them annoying.  I left Texture Detail at high because it made no difference (unlike with Oblivion).  If the design of the lot supports it, Object Hiding On will result in better performance, but some lots are annoying to play unless Off.   The more levels there are in the lot, the slower the game will be when rendering the upper levels if Object Hiding is Off.

My biggest performance gain came from deleting some early meshes that had too many polygons.

Lambi....Thanks for the link to the guide, very helpful!
Lordrichter....I do like to play big lots so thats something I will keep in mind. I do have a fairly extensive collection of custom hair meshes so maybe I may need to do some purging there too.
Thanks to all who have reponded. I am purchasing a new laptop and it has 2000MB RAM with an Nvidia Go 7300 256MB card and the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and I am hoping to run the Sims2 with all EPs. At least now I know what to do if I have to adjust for graphic performance.