How to run The Sims 2 in current year

December 22, 2025

Currently if you want to run The Sims 2 in your new machine, it's likely that you'll be greeted with:

Failed to find any directx 9.0c campatible graphics adapters in this system! please make sure you have a directx 9.0c compatible graphics adapter and have installed the latest drivers provided by the manufacturer. the application will now terminate.

This is due to the game having a whitelist of which GPUs are capable of running the game, completele oblivious to the fact that more recent ones exist (maybe to upsell The Sims 3?)

For many years the best answers have been:

Create a shortcut and add -w so it opens in a window.
Use Graphics Rule Maker and add your GPU to the list.

But there is actually a better option that only requires dropping one .dll into the game directory, making it fully work out of the box.

You have to download DXVK, a library to convert Direct3D applications to run with Vulkan instead.

Just download the latest release and extract the .tar.gz (You'll need a program like 7-Zip, as Windows can't handle those by default)

Inside there will be a x32 folder, with a d3d9.dll file inside, you have to copy that where Sims2EP9.exe is located, and also where TS2BodyShop.exe is.

Example:

The Sims 2\
└  Mansion and Garden Stuff\
   ├  CSBin\
   │  ├ d3d9.dll (from DXVK)
   │  └ TS2BodyShop.exe
   └  TSBin\
      ├ d3d9.dll (from DXVK)
      └ Sims2EP9.exe

This will make the game think you are using an NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX which IS in the whitelist, so you won't have to deal with modifying Mansion and Garden Stuff\TSData\Res\Config\Video Cards.sgr or Graphics Rules.sgr located in the same folder

However, this still leaves the issue of the game using 800x600 resolution, with a maximum of 1600x1200, for which it's easy to just use “Graphics Rule Maker” mentioned above to change them, or you could edit the Graphics Rules.sgr yourself.

But wait, this not only makes it run better and work out of the box, but also fixes some bugs, like the Sims Shadows, so it's not useless, besides, if you change GPUs, you won't have to run GRM again ;)