Video card not workign up to standard.

[gunbrown]

Ok so i've got 128MB video mem. and i'm trying to play sims on it and it freezes up contantly and takes forever to load. game only requires 32MB so whats the deal? my ram is is 384MB and processor is 1.8GHz so i doubt those are the problem. the chip is a VIA Chrome9 HC IGP and i'm running on windows XP Pro. A response is greatly appreciated 

[homer]

have you lowered the graphics all the way down? does it still freeze?

[Eg0Death]

Has the game ever run properly with this hardware?  What is your operating system?

[gunbrown]

yup, all the unnecessary stuff is off, only the base graphics. I'm using Windows XP Pro. While playing, the game runs pretty fine initially but after 15 minutes or so its starts to freeze up. the game loads a little slow initially but if i minimize the screen and reopen it it loads extremely slow, up to 7 minutes. It's always been like this. Same game runs fine on my girlfriend's laptop

[Calum]

That's a low end integrated graphics chip.
Did the game ever work properly on that laptop?

[gunbrown]

hehe, sounds like a laptop doesn't it? anyways, its a pc and its been like that since i've been playing the game. so it looks like i'll be needing a  graphics card then. will an additional graphics card work in conjunction with the on board gpu? if so will another low-end graphics card be ok to work with it?.

[homer]

will an additional graphics card work in conjunction with the on board gpu?

no, you will need to disable the onboard in your BIOS and you will need to uninstall all the drivers for it.

if so will another low-end graphics card be ok to work with it?.

you mean going SLI or Crossfire? if thats what you mean, then no, thats not a good idea.

[Broni]

384MB

is one of the issues

[Kai-yan]

Dear Friend,
                Freeze=hang, it is sometimes not as simple as you expect: it may be the plague of having the bad capacitors.

[soybean]

if so will another low-end graphics card be ok to work with it?.

I see the system requirements for "The Sims 2" is not too high.  So, I would think you could go with a fairly low-end card.  Do you an AGP slot, or only PCI slots?

[Calum]

hehe, sounds like a laptop doesn't it? anyways, its a pc

Sorry, my bad.  I got confused.
You'll need a dedicated graphics card, but if you're only playing this game then a low-end one would be fine.
Something like a 7300GT or 7600GS would play that game pretty well, and wouldn't be very expensive.
When you get a graphics card you'll get the shared RAM back too, bringing you to 512Mb total.

[elxr06]

yes. maybe your computer is working too hard swapping memory between computer's ram and the graphics card ram.

so buy yourself a cheap graphics card like a 7600gs or a 8500gt if you're just playing only the sims.

8500gt is a bit slower than the 7600gs, so maybe get the DDR3 model.

But upside is that the 8500gt has better HTPC capability if that's your interest too.

[patio]

The requirements for the Sims are grossly understated.
I think this was intentional on their part.

[elxr06]

that sure is right.

The Sims System Requirements

Windows Min. Requirements
Windows 95 or 98
233MHz Pentium Processor
32MB RAM
300MB free hard drive space
2MB Video Card
DirectX 7 Compatible Sound Card

Source: http://simgaming.net/thesims/info/

Even my dad's old 7 year old dell computer he's using now can run it. He's using windows 2000 with 512mb of ram, and a nvidia geforce fx5200 card that has 128 mb dedicated memory.