Hey Game,

After 6 years it was time to replace my wife's aging, desktop replacement laptop. So I took advantage of a recent sale and picked up a Lenovo y510p. Here are the specs:

• Core i7-4700MQ
• 8GB Ram
• 1TB 5400 HDD (will add an 120GB msata in the future)
• NVIDIA GeForce GT750M GDDR5 2GB
• Windows 8 64-bit

My wife LOVES the Sims and other games of it's type. Most of these are EA games. So we spent a huge chunk of this past Saturday downloading and installing all her games. They all launch and run. But they all run like utter crap. The Sims 3 is playable but there is near constant stutter and frame rate issues.

More modern games seem to run ok but what I am noticing is that none of the EA titles are using the NVIDIA card. Instead the games are using the Integrated 4600 graphics chip. This is even after I try to force the games to use the NVIDIA card. Anyone have any idea what would cause this?

Is this an EA issue or is it a Windows 8 issue? Is this something that I can fix or should I wipe the thing and try to throw Win 7 on it? Any help would be great appreciated.

Do regular games use the Nvidia card? Perhaps the card is not working?

Or try this: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=481768

I got a new ASUS machine last christmas with windows 8, and recently tried installing Mass Effect 1 and Splinter Cell Conviction to play them again and both said they were incompatible with my operating system.

It made me sad :(

But I also wasn't determined enough to try fixing the problem.

sorry I was of no help!

@mosdl: I found that exact option about 2 hours ago but even after setting it the game will not use the blasted card. It's almost as if the EA games don't WANT to use new graphics cards.

That's weird. It's definitely not Windows 8 though because I recently installed the sims on a windows 8 pc and it runs perfectly fine.

You might want to disable the onboard GPU... Its most likely trying to use the Intel 4000 HD or whichever number it is instead of the Nvidia.... best way to check is to boot into bios and make sure onboard card is disabled.... The GTX 750M can run battlefield 3 at 1080 res around 50FPS no problem, you easierly have enough raw power in the laptop to run anything! it sounds like its using the onboard GPU and not the Nvidia one so check and make sure.... Otherwise it could be a driver issue, Nvidia's latest driver are far from perfect right now, for the first time in a long long time for Nvidia, and it just simply might not be optimized for Windows 8 yet as that is still a pretty new GPU for laptops...........

An update:

Well after a couple of reboots and some more patching of all 13 expansions I finally got the Sim3 running on the damn thing AND using the video card. I think @vackillers has hit the goomba on the head with the Nvidia driver issues and Windows 8. I've been surfing around and found a LOT of folks have issues with Win8 drivers. I would have gone with WIn 7 if that was an option but since I didn't build the laptop it was not. :(

So far the EA games are the only ones giving me issues. Ran Civ 5 and Bioshock Infinite great but these older EA games don't seem to run right. And that appears to be an issue with Their engines and Win8.

glad to be of any help what so ever, and thanks for the update, I'm hoping that you'll be able to get or find a proper fix for this soon enough.... GB forums of course might not be the best source to find fixes for this stuff though, could go check out EA official forums about it all if you haven't already done that or windows 8 forums, see what the general consensuses on the issue and if anyone else has issues with EA and Win8 games...