ReShade Depth Buffer Problems After Neighbourhood Stories Patch

Quite a few people are reporting problems with depth buffer effects like MXAO flickering on and off since the Neighbourhood Stories patch.

It hasn't affected me, so it's taking me some time to properly troubleshoot it, as I'm reliant on others testing lots of things in their games.

Two people so far have said that limiting their fps to 30 fixed it for them, but for many others that didn't work.

One thing I'd like people to test for me if they're having this problem is to go into the new Sims Delivery Express menu and turn off all the options there.

Go into the delivery time drop down menu and turn it off or select the least frequent check time if the option to turn it off isn't there. And then uncheck the Automatically Download box. Next, restart your game, double check the Sims Delivery Express is still all turned off, and then see if the flickering has stopped.

If it hasn't, next thing to do is to keep the Sims Delivery Express turned off, but then also turn off Origin In-Game. 

If that doesn't work, keep all the same steps as above, but also take Origin offline (under the Origin tab on the top left of the Origin app).

If that doesn't work, next disconnect from the internet completely.

If that doesn't work, send me a message and I'll ask you to install a modded version of ReShade to test if that fixes it. But you must have gone through all the steps above first.

The reason I'm pursuing this line of troubleshooting is that ReShade has anti-cheat stuff built into it to stop people using the depth buffer to cheat in competitive games. How it works is it checks for a certain type of network activity, and once detected it either blocks the depth buffer completely or interrupts it periodically as the game pings the server.

Obviously The Sims 4 isn't a competitive online game, but the new Sims Delivery Express service might be making regular calls to EA's server looking for new content, which might be alerting ReShade's anti-cheat stuff and making it interrupt the depth buffer. Of course it shouldn't do this, but that's more down to how EA has set up how the game pings the server rather than it being the fault of ReShade.

So, turning off the Sims Delivery Express service might fix it. Doing that and also disconnecting from the internet might fix it. However, unfortunately some games still try to contact the server behind the scenes even if you tell it not to. If that's the case with TS4 now - if indeed this is the reason for the flickering (it still might not be!) - there may not be much we can do. But! that modified version of ReShade disables the anti-cheat checks for network activity, so it could be a solution if all else fails. The problem is it's an unofficial and unsupported version of ReShade, and sort of a naughty version, if you will. It hasn't been provided by the people who make ReShade, and it certainly shouldn't be used routinely and it definitely shouldn't be used in any online competitive games (the game platform will ban you if you do - TS4 won't, because it's not a competitive game). So, I'm only offering to send people that version if they've gone through and exhausted all other steps first.

If you're NOT having problems with the depth buffer since this update, I would appreciate you telling me so I can try and gauge the scale of the problem. It's affecting a lot of people, but by no means everyone. I don't know why!

Thanks!