Game Help:Getting new graphics cards recognized by the game

Issue

Excited at having upgraded your graphics card, but disappointed at the graphics ending up looking worse than the IGP or weaker GPU you had before? Well, there's a reason for that!

How to confirm this is indeed the issue you're having? Open the DeviceConfig.log in your text editor program or double-click it. In Windows this would open Notepad, and in OSX this would open TextEditor. Look for these lines:

• GPU: ?? in the Rating info section
• [Found: 0, Matched: 1] in the Graphics device info section

They are shown in the below excerpt on the first and last lines respectively.

=== Rating info ===
GPU: 1 GPU Memory: 4 CPU: 4 RAM: 4 CPU Speed: 3064 Threading: 3
Adjusted CPU: 3686 RAM: 6142 Adjusted RAM: 5630 Cores: 4
:
:
=== Graphics device info ===
Number:          0
Name (driver):   AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series
Name (database): AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series [Found: 0, Matched: 1]

If the game does not recognize that GPU because it is too new, it would be shown as Found: 0 and then the game assigns the lowest rating of 1 to the GPU and adjusts the game's Graphical options accordingly.

Cause

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The .sgr files in \Game\Bin\ has not been updated to include newer cards. And so, the default lowest values are used.

Solution

You just need to edit the .sgr files to include the new card's model. Here's how to do it.

1. Go to <install path>\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Game\Bin
2. Copy, paste and rename these two files with an ".orig" extension
   • GraphicsCards.sgr
   • GraphicsRules.sgr