Bought brand new laptop, now Sims 2 graphics don't work? Hi guys, I bought a laptop with the following specs: ATI Radeon x1200 Processor BrandIntel Pentium Dual-Core Processor Speed1.73GHz Display TypeWXGA widescreen TFT-LCD with TruBrite technology (1280 x 800) Type of Memory (RAM)PC4200 DDR2 Hard Drive TypeSerial ATA (5400 rpm) Hard Drive Size120GB System Memory (RAM)1GB DirectX version 10 The people are really messed up... sometimes they are just a blur of triangles and rectangles that take up the screen. Other times, their body is disconnected from their head or disappears altogether. I updated my drivers on the internet. Any ideas? Thank you!!
well i'm a bit worried about 1280x800. Is that what you have your screen set at when playing ? Try 1280x 1024. Or even lower settings. See if that works.
What video card do you have? It doesn't matter what your screen resolution is in Windows because the game changes it to whatever is set in the game options.
Not sure... I'm not totally dense when it comes to computers but I seem to have a hard time figuring out what my video card is because under the "Video" option in device manager, it only tells me what my audio card is? Ack! Thanks for your help.
Flameback, thank you so much for your help. 1. AMD Turion 64 x 2 Mobile Technology TL-56 (2 CPUs) ~1.8GHz 2. 894MB RAM 3. Windows Vista Home Premium 6.0 4. 163 GB free 5. 184 GB total 6. DirectX 10 7. ATI Radeon X1200 8. 7.14.00.10.0496 Version; 4/24/2007 Date 9. 318 MB 10.Sims 2, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons, Family Fun Stuff 11. The animated characters' bodies are often fuzzy and separated from their heads. Sometimes the fuzzy bodys turn into giant vector forms (like big rectangles and trianges) that take up the screen during game play. The game is playable but it's just VERY annoying.
Flameback, thanks for moderating and being so helpful to everyone. I know these questions are NOT FUN to answer. That link didn't give me a working webpage (seems like linking to that site doesn't work well). Can you be a little more specific about what drivers I need to update? I did an update through my Windows Vista "automatic driver updates" program before. I tried to find a Radeon X1200 update but they don't have that series on the website (very disconcerting!). Do I need to update my AMD Turion? I don't see a very recent update on AMD's site that outdates my computer which is brand new...
Ah, sorry about that, try this link. Download the 'Catalyst Software Suite (32bit)English Only' I'll add that TS2 doesn't run well on laptops, and with integrated graphics it may play even worse, but it's worth a try.
We are experiencing the same problem, new laptop with a fresh install (no custom content) and the people are detached from their heads and the bodies are very strange. We also have the ATI x1200 video card. I tried downloading and installing the files above, and several other downloaded drivers for the video card and nothing has worked so far. After years of the wife complaining about her slow desktop, I bought her a new laptop and it isn't working! Help! Have others successfully used this video card for their Sims game? DxDiag for our system: 1. AMD Turion Mobile Technology TL-56 (2 CPU's) 1.8 gh 2. 1918 mb RAM 3. Windows Vista Home Premium 6.0 4. 189 GB Free 5. 231 GB total 6. DirectX Version 10 7. ATI Radeon x1200 8. atiumdag.dll, atiumdav.dat, atiitmmxx version 7.14.0010.0496 4/25/2007 9. 830 mb 10. Sims 2 (only) 11. Crazy people!
Bad news for us. I got an email back from EA Games that says ATI RAdeon X1200 simply isn't compatable with Sims. They say there's really nothing they or we can do about it because this card doesn't have the full capabilities necessary to run the game. Now I am at a loss for what to do. I don't do anything on my laptop but play Sims, and the sales guy who sold it to me three weeks ago told me it was perfectly sufficient to do so... Flameback, should I try downloading from the link above, as you suggested? I don't want it to harm the computer but maybe it's worth a shot? Many thanks for the help.
Not sure what we are going to do either. I was worried this was the problem. If you aren't a real technical junkie, it's misleading how they name the video cards. We thought because the x1200 was inbetween the x850 and x1600 (when we researched) that it would be fine. Of course after a few hours of digging and learning, we now know that it's a subpar intergrated graphics card. We bought the new laptop 2 weeks ago from O f fice D e pot during the no tax weekend. Their policy on laptops is to only exchange for the exact same model. Thought about trying to "upgrade" to a new laptop from them and see if they would go for that, but I'm having a hard time finding any laptop with one of the listed cards (at least not at ODepot) at any price. The wife only really wanted the laptop for the Sims games. Is there a list of laptops somewhere that have the better video cards and are Sims 2 compatible? We might have to suck it up and buy 2 or trade somebody. Thanks for the help!!!
Sounds like an issue with Vista really. Try turning off the aero interface of Vista before starting the game. Update your drivers also. Start Orb, Control Panel, Personalize, Theme - Select Windows Classic, apply and try running the game. If updating and trying that doesn't work, there's not much else you can do as updating a laptop's graphics card (or adding one) is usually impossible.
Thanks Flameback. I'll try that and report back to see if it works. Is it really impossible to replace a graphics card? I had imagined it would be fairly easy but what the hell do I know!
Replacing a graphics card in a desktop is much easier than to try and fit one in a laptop and most of the time there's no room to do so.
Also, since the graphics card was on the motherboard there may not be a slot for a descrete graphics card. We were lucky, OD did take a return on our new laptop. In case anyone elses searches this thread in the future it was a Toshiba A215 s4747 model. A nice laptop, but didn't like the Sims 2. Now we are on the hunt for a different laptop that will play the game out of the box, but that's a new thread. Thanks for all the help and good luck Anniew!!
WOW, that is the exact laptop I bought. I'm just going to stick with it... the game is playable (though slightly annoying) and maybe the corruption is a good thing!... less desire to play. Sad, though!
