#ts4 graphics

I ran into this problem when I was testing a texture for a cc top I was making. I got so stressed out checking my texture files, checking for sneaky pixels, checking the bump, specular, and shadow maps, checking the UV maps, checking the mesh...

It wasn’t until I started checking EA’s textures that I realized it was not a problem with the texture, it was a problem with The Sims 4′s graphics.

After reaching out Discord about the problem, the ever-brilliant sim_man123 suggested that it might be a problem with ansiotropic filtering. Having recently followed Ravasheen’s Visible Mesh Fix tutorial, I took a gamble and checked the Nvidia Profile Inspector for ansiotropic filtering settings, and lo and behold, a few clicks later and the textures in game looked much better!

You will need:

Nvidia Profile Inspector (Click on the latest version and download “nvidiaProfileInspector.zip“)

Knowledge/ability to extract compressed files (7-Zip or a similar program)

Installing Nvidia Profile Inspector

Extract the contents of “nvidiaProfileInspector.zip“ (the contents should be nvidiaProfileInspector.exe and a Reference.xml file) and place them somewhere you will be able to find them. I personally placed mine in a folder I already use labeled “Utilities”.

Enabling Ansiotropic Filtering

To enable Ansiotropic Filtering, run the nvidiaProfileInspector.exe, which will open up the program.

1. In the Profiles drop-down menu, select Sims 4. You can type “Sims” to narrow down the list if you have a lot of games.

2. Scroll down until you get to the section titled “Texture Filtering”

3. Change the settings as follows:

Ansiotropic filtering mode: User defined/Off

Ansiotropic filtering setting: 16x

Texture filtering - Ansiotropic filter optimization: On

4. Click “Apply changes” and close the program.

A few notes:

What does this do?

It allows Nvidia Profile Inspector to manage graphics settings that aren’t available in The Sims 4′s bare-bones graphics settings panel.

Because of this, the changes you make are only going to affect what you see on your computer. Other people who haven’t enabled ansiotropic filtering will still see the warped textures on their own computers.

Will this work on every computer?

I am not an expert on video game graphics, so I honestly don’t know. I asked sim_man123 about this, and they said:

the filtering is not likely to cause any issues for anyone with a dedicated graphics card. the way that I understand it, it compares pixels on the "displayed texture" on the mesh against the "actual" texture image, and then adjusts accordingly to improve accuracy. the filtering level determines how many times it does this - so 16x will display the texture on the mesh, check the rendered pixel values against the textures, adjust, check again, etc - 16 times total. it sounds like a lot, but it's basically just a lot of back-and-forth that requires a decent bit of dedicated video memory. (which is why any dedicated graphics card should be able to handle it fairly well - an integrated Intel graphics chip that's using a tiny bit of system RAM, maybe not so much) [...] that's just my understanding of it - I may not be entirely correct :smile:

Which I understand to mean that most computers will be able to handle this setting tweak. If you’re playing The Sims on a potato laptop and your graphics settings are on low, you may want to proceed with caution.

For reference, my computer is a 10-year-old gaming computer running The Sims 4 on ultra settings.