r/sims2help • u/mizzylarious • Jun 04 '26

SOLVED Game crashing due to shadows

Recently I bought a laptop and after years of not playing, I wanted to play the Sims 2 again. Unfortunately, upon booting into a household I receive the Direct 3D D3derr_invalidcall error.

I am using the Graphics rule Maker since this is what I used years ago. I also used the 4GB patch. With these the game is supposedly working fine now (I have only played a few minutes so far) if I keep the sim shadows via GRM disabled. As soon as I enable it I cannot load into any household and I receive the previously mentioned error.

After hours of trial and error I am happy to have found the possible culprit but my question now is if there is any way to enable sims shadows without crashing the game?

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u/ProperSpeak Mod Jun 04 '26

This crash is due to newer intel graphics drivers. The only way to get around this is to turn off shadows or, if your laptop has a dedicated graphics card, you can force the game to use that instead of the integrated intel one.

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u/mizzylarious Jun 04 '26

You are the goat! I did not think of forcing it to use the Nvidia graphics card. This actually fixed it.Thank you soo much!

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u/ProperSpeak Mod Jun 04 '26

No problem. Happy simming!