The Sims 2 - pink textures problem.

You're in the very start of your way to nostalgia heaven, young padawan.
Next thing you may face - a dreadful Pink Soup. Let me tell a bit about it.


You're logging in TS2 and you see all the ingame textures flashing pink and your characters is flying around in T-pose. It may occur now, then, after a hour of game or after some minutes. Or you're lucky one and this is not your case. Lucky you! But you're one to thousands and when you'll update your graphic card and/or its drivers, you'll likely be among us.


In desperate moves you'll be trying a hell number of things, following a hell number of guides. Some will seem helpful but not for a long time. Forget it. See, causes are unfixable:


1) A game loads its textures in graphics card' memory.
2) At some point textures are hoarded in a memory page game can read. Same comes to vertex shaders.
3) A DirectX manages them to some other memory page to optimize pipeline flow.
4) A game uses DX 9.0c methods to reclaim its precious assets but...
5) DX11-12 supplied with Win10 after anniversary update (ah, silly me, forgot to mention it's a pure W8-W10 problem!) uses methods that are compatible.
6) But not compatible enough to provide the game with sight into other memory page.
7) At this point we can do anything. But all we do is in the fact we trying to diminish the game's Video RAM usage. That's why it occasionally helps. All of it. Including shaders turned off, PC reboot, drivers reset, GraphicRules.sgr, et cetera.


Ok, you say, but what can I do to have some nostalgy dose?



Well, multiple things. At first - I advice you to blow a dust off your old NVIDIA card in case you stayed with it back in the days and still use NVIDIA. (AMD users - please pass this paragraph, I haven't any experience, sorry).
You'll need to insert it back as second GPU and choose to use it for TS2EPXX.exe from NV control panel. The main requirement - its video RAM must not be over last TS2 system requirements. Or it may be, but a lil... You know why it will help.



As for me - I simply installed WIN7 in parallel to my Win10 and when I feel nostalgic, I switch OS to that and am playing fine on my modern GPU (GTX 1080Ti) and up-to-date drivers. That's why I am assuming that DirectX 9.0c that comes with WIN7 manages video memory in a correct way - the way game sees and can use.




A huge shout-out to Leefish and other fellow simmers who were the first explorers/resolvers of that darn Pink Soup problem.




Gatekeeper Edit: message split from original topic, and stickied. 

- The_gh0stm4n