Hey, everyone!

I've been playing around with screenshots in The Sims 4 for the past couple of days, to put gameplay images up onto my Tumblr and such, but I was wondering if anybody knows of a way to make the images of a higher resolution? I play my game full-screen at 1080 but the capture screenshot seems to only capture really low-res (and small!) images. I know Fraps can raise this ever so slightly (from about 1mb of the default screenshot capture in-game to around 2mb images), but the screenshots aren't as crisp as some people's that I've seen around. Also, with the official Sims images that EA share over their social media, they look crazy bananas high-resolution.

Thank you all in advance!

:D

Hi there,

It's strange that resolution of screenshots is smaller than that of a game. Sims 4 saves screens as .png files ("My Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/Screenshots"), Fraps can save as .png .jpg .bmp or .tga, I tried all, and quality-wise there is not much difference, but that depends on actual screenshot (different colours will be compressed differently on different file types.
Bear in mind that official EA shots are most probably retouched in PhotoShop or something like that to make them look more appealing.

Here are some examples made my most awesome me:

In-Game capture (.png 1.9MB)


Fraps capture (.png 1.76MB)


Fraps capture (.jpg 199KB)

Sadly I don't know how to disable UI.
Unfortunately photobucket does not allow .bmp files and automatically converts them to .png. Original .bmp file had 5.04MB, the same for .tga.

You can check the quality of the above and see if there is a difference. I don't see much

__

I think it must just be being used to the huge file sizes/image quality that I can get for my blog posts over in Second Life that is making me freak out about the small image sizes. In Second Life I can shoot images much larger than that of the screen resolution (My screenshots in Second Life are saved at around 5000x2000ish) which obviously makes for much higher quality editing in photo retouching software.

I guess that is what I am looking for, a method to shoot in a higher resolution that the game window, but I doubt that is actually doable within TS4? It'd be nice if they had included a wider array of snapshot options in the game, considering that they have such good video capture options available!

Ahh... I see.
I don't know about Second Life, but it looks like the game upps the resolution for the purpose of screenshot. It's a nice feature, sadly I don't think The Sims have something like that. It appears you are stuck the same as we are.

BUT...

If you are running on nVidia card, you can force high Antialiasing in NV control panel, that will reduce the sharp "edges'. High settings will eat up performance, but the game will look better on screenshots.
I'm certain you can also force higher AA on ATI cards, but I don't know how.

EDIT: I'm not sure if that will work, but if you want you can try SweetFX. Apart from cool visual options it also has some AA settings as well.

One can only dream, eh?

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to reply to me and being so very helpful, I appreciate it a lot. I have a nVidia card, and I'll give that a shot to see if it works!

Hi,

Sorry for Necro'ing this thread, but something new came up.

On "new-ish" nVidia cards (GTX 500+) you can now (with drivers 344.48) use DRS which is Dynamic Super Resolution. Basically you can bump resolution higher than before, and that scales down to your monitor native settings. As a result you get better Anti-Aliasing. And you can take higher resolution screenshots.

To enable that, go to "nVidia Control Panel", then "Manage 3D Settings" and under "Global" select "DSR - Factors". Here you can tick all boxes. Then you get extra resolutions in game. Unfortunately game itself does not support these resolutions, so you will get tiny UI at 4x. But you can still take higher res shots, so that's a plus.

Examples here:

My native 1680 x 1050


And with DSR 3360 x 2100

I know this is off topic, but that house is amazing! Do you have it for download anywhere?

Thanks, this is working for me. The in-game anti-aliasing was only giving a minimal effect. And forcing anti-aliasing from the Nvidia control panel isn't working correctly. It actually worsens the jagged edges in the game. But using DSR @ 2880 x 1620 makes most jagged edges almost smooth. Using DSR 3360 x 2100 all jagged lines are gone but it's got a heavy impact on the graphics card, temperature goes through the roof. I wish anti-aliasing was working right, wouldn't need DSR.