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.

Remove Mods before updating your game

Published on March 27, 2015 by BluebellFlora3 Comments

This is still catching so many out but it really is very simple – if you have Mods in your game then you MUST move them out of your Sims 4 folder before updating/patching your game. You must, you have to, it’s the law.

If you don’t move your mods out your game may become unplayable. To make sure you are never caught out by automatic updates, turn them off. Here are the simple steps to ensuring a (hopefully) happy game after updating with Mods:

Make sure automatic updates are turned off for your game. Open Origin then go to Preferences:
Make sure you’re in the General tab and scroll down to Updates. Automatically keep my games up to date and Automatically keep Origin up to date should both be unticked. For good measure, make sure Ignore non-mandatory game updates is ticked:
Make sure Origin is not automatically loading when you start up/login to your Mac. Automatically launch Origin when I log in should be unticked:
To verify that Origin shouldn’t be loading at startup/login you can double check whilst it’s open. Right click on the Origin icon in your Dock, go to Options and make sure Open at Login is unticked:
And finally, to triply make sure Origin shouldn’t be loading at startup/login, check your user account preferences. Open System Preferences then click on Users & Groups:Make sure your user account is selected then click on Login Items in the right hand pane. Origin should not show up there at all: If Origin is showing there simply click on it and then click on the minus (-) symbol under the window. That will remove it.

That’s it. Your game should never update automatically now. You will be prompted to update when you open Origin and when you launch the game. So remember, if you have Mods –