Kooky Lighting With New Laptop - BV & Freetime

[Simsbaby]

Augh fuhugwagads. I recently got myself a new laptop. It's a Dell Vostro 1500. I love it. It's a tank compared to my flimsy old Toshiba. It's nice and fast too, which is why I'm bothered that I'm having this problem. In The Sims 2 I'm getting glitches with lighting. It seems like terrain and outside floor shadows are messing up, in both lots and neighborhood view. I'm running version 174.31 of the nVidia Drivers. It's the only thing that I can tell is broken, everything else is working correctly. I'd love to get this fixed as it's pretty annoying.

Dell Vostro 1500
Windows Vista Ultimate
2.20GHz intel Core2Duo
2.5GB 667MHz RAM (Shipped with 1.0GB)
250GB 5400RPM HD (Shipped with 80GB)
256MB nVidia GeForce 8600M

I think that's everything. I tried to take a few screenshots, but they usually come out looking normal. This one is a bit weird though.
http://i31.tinypic.com/4zw37.jpg

[Emma]

Looks sorta ok to me-have you tried playing with shadows off?

[jolrei]

Processor is fine.  2.5G of RAM is low for a Vista rig running TS2.  Vista uses a lot of RAM.  Other issues may be related to the Nvidia card - there are reported issues with some Nvidia cards and TS2.  You might try doing a search here using "Nvidia 8600" as keywords and see if anyone else reported anything on this.  As Emma suggested, try running with shadows at medium or off.

[jsalemi]

[Simsbaby]

Uhh... More Rams it is then. My dad has another 2GB RAM chip in his laptop. I'll take it out later and put it it mine, see how things go with it. Vista is only 32bit though, not sure how much I'll gain from that.
I tried turning off shadows and shaders, still getting kooky looking ground. It's not always though. Just changing the angle of the camera might cause it to show up. I can't really do anything about that. Does anyone have a favorite set of drivers they use with their nVidia card that does well?

[jolrei]

If the ground textures show up properly on some occasions, but degrade when you change angles, zoom out, etc., it may simply be a matter of not enough RAM available, and the computer is compensating.  Install moar RAMZ and see what happens.

[jsalemi]

Uhh... More Rams it is then. My dad has another 2GB RAM chip in his laptop. I'll take it out later and put it it mine, see how things go with it. Vista is only 32bit though, not sure how much I'll gain from that.

You'll get the whole 4Gb, pretty much, though Vista will only report 3.5Gb.  Windows moves stuff up into high RAM (pointers to video memory, stuff like that) that uses up a chunk of memory.  With 4GB, it moves that stuff into the top .5 that you can't use anyway, leaving pretty much all of the lower 3.5 available.  Even with all my drivers, antivirus, etc loaded, cacheman reports around 3.1Gb available (under XP -- YMMV).

[Simsbaby]

I gave it a shot. I put the other 2GB chip in and removed the 512MB I had. I couldn't really tell any change system wise. My Windows Vista score stayed the same (4., but it did recognize the memory. The game worked perfectly though, I didn't see any graphical glitches that I could tell. However, when I went back to my memory the game didn't glitch again. It continued to work correctly. I don't know if it's going to come back or not, but I don't think I will upgrade the memory just yet.