NVIDIA – Bluebellflora

Running El Capitan on a Mac with NVIDIA graphics and can’t play Sims 4?

Published on March 2, 2016 by BluebellFlora3 Comments

Then contact EA, post on the forums and make a noise. Most Macs with NVIDIA GPUs still cannot play the Sims 4 since updating to El Capitan due to an issue with the game not liking NVIDIA. This affects Mac with the following graphics cards, according to reports over on the official forum:

NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M 512 MB
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 512 MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 512 MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX 1024 MB
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 1024 MB
NVIDIA GeForce GT 775M 1024 MB

El Capitan was released on the 30th September 2015. Reports started being posted pretty much straight away that the game was unplayable whereas before the OS upgrade it had been working fine. Can you believe that this problem still hasn’t been fixed, 5 months later? No, I’m not particularly surprised either. Anyone remember the almighty mess that EA managed to not bother with when Lion was released? Or how about the other NVIDIA issue that took them forever to fix?

SimGuruJanitor, who had already popped up on the stickied thread on the official game forum, gallantly informed us that a December patch would “address many of these issues”:

See what he did there? He pretty much blamed Apple for the game not working. Isn’t that the nice, easy way out? Plenty of software engineers and developers manage to keep up with Apple and support their latest OS offerings but not EA. It is irritating that graphics updates come through Apple in OS updates but that’s the way it works and EA know that.

He then disappeared, never to be heard from again. He’s been tagged but never responded. It’s now the 2nd March and the game is still unplayable.

The Sims 4 unplayable on some 2012 model Macs updated to El Capitan

Published on November 5, 2015 by BluebellFlora2 Comments

Some Mac users who have upgraded to El Capitan have found their Sims 4 games unplayable. This is due to certain NVIDIA GeForce 6xx series graphics cards no longer being compatible with the game. The affected Macs are mainly those with 512 MB VRAM:

Late 2012 21″ iMac – Model Identifier 13,1 – Model No. A1418
Late 2012 27″ iMac – Model Identifier 13,2 – Model No. A1419
Late 2012 15″ MacBook Pro – Model Identifier 9,1 – Model No. A1286 (650M 512 MB)

And the listed graphics cards are:

NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M 512 MB
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 512 MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 512 MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX 1024 MB (possibly)

EA are aware of this issue and are issuing a fix….. in December:

If you want to post on the thread over on the official forums you can find it here.

Sorry for all those affected, this ridiculous situation reminds me of when OS X Lion was released and Sims 3 was unplayable for a lot of Mac users. That took EA a couple of months to fix too. Shameful.

Updates on OS X El Capitan and The Sims 3 and Sims 4

Published on October 18, 2015 by BluebellFlora2 Comments

Two main issues have come up for those who have updated to OS X El Capitan:

The Sims 3 – Those playing the disc version are experiencing the disc authorization error. This can be fixed by uninstalling your most recent EP/SP and downloading and installing the digital version through Origin. Instructions here.

The Sims 4 – Those who have Macs with a NVIDIA GeForce GT/GTX 6xxM 512 MB graphics card don’t seem to be able to properly play. The game is glitching, crashing and freezing. This only affects the GPUs with 512 MB VRAM.

There are threads on the officials and AHQ related to this. The Sims 4 El Capitan thread has been stickied and SimGuruJanitor has posted in it. As usual no other acknowledgement has been made so all we can do is hope that EA are still paying attention to it.