After not playing my game for a few weeks, I went to pull it up today and noticed something was a bit wonky. I could not adjust the screen resolution above 800x600. This was a problem I'd never encountered before, and the game had always worked fine up until this point. Here is a screen shot for reference.



"Well this is funny," I thought. "Better head on over to the FAQs to see what I can learn about that there wonky graphics setting." So, I did. To make a long story short, I went through the Game Problem FAQ as well as this help page and this help page. Nothing I could find in Game Help fixed the problem, so I uninstalled everything and began the long and daunting task of reinstalling. So far, I have base game, University, and Nightlife installed. After installing University, I was able to successfully change the resolution after removing/testing without user files as detailed in steps 5 and 6 in the Game Help FAQ. However, after installing Nightlife, the resolution reverted back to 800x600, and I was unable to repeat the success from before. I deleted the cache files before booting up, and being as this is a fresh install, I know the problem isn't from something I've downloaded.

Please help! I want my pretty, high-resolution graphics back.

Edit: Appears to be solved after a) reinstalling the game and b) doing some handwaving with my graphics card driver. At any rate, my game is working again.

Edit again: It's back to not letting me change resolution again. My drivers are all updated and working. I don't know what to do.

It looks like your game might be running on your chip rather than your graphics card since grey edges are also turned off saying it doesn't have enough power. Reinstalling is usually a waste of time and the very last thing to try as it's very unlikely that the issue is your installation files.

It's odd that it just changed suddenly. Has your graphics card been changed recently? If your game is running correctly then you should be able to change your resolution. It just looks like the game mistakenly believes that your computer can't handle a higher resolution despite your other settings being on high. You could just manually change the resolution in the game files.

Did you get a windows update or a graphics driver update?

Have a look here: http://www.leefish.nl/mybb/showthread.php?tid=5446

I think there was a system update at some point, but I use my PC so infrequently these days (switched all my gaming to PS4 and don't sim as much as I used to) that I honestly can't remember if I opened my game before the system update or not. After your initial observation, @joandsarah77, I started troubleshooting different things related to the graphics card and ended up making my problem worse - my computer stopped detecting the card completely. Fortunately, that problem sorted itself out, and the most up-to-date driver reinstalled when I powered it on about an hour ago.

I'm working my way through the reinstallation process as we speak. Open for Business worked fine and let me change the screen resolution. I know the graphics card is definitely working now - I opened up Skyrim Special Edition a few minutes ago and it's performing beautifully at max settings - so hopefully this problem has sorted itself out. I'll finish the reinstallation, and if all is well, I'll change the status of this thread. Thank you all for your help.

Oh good, I hope it keeps that up. *fingers crossed*

Well, I don't know what I did or how I did it, but I've finished the reinstall and things are showing up the way they're supposed to. It must have been something with my video card, and it appears to be resolved. I'm closing this case.

Edit: The foundation I built my hopes upon was dashed. It is doing the same thing again.

@Freelala
I did not go for Leefish when I got these problems, but followed the instructions on these 2 links and it did the job for me.
Maybe this can help you too.
https://www.forestbalrog.com/game-stuck-in-800x600.html
https://www.forestbalrog.com/smooth...greyed-out.html

It looks like the OP found a solution, but this is a recurring problem, so in case others find this through Google, this worked for me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gmg298sZMo

Found a solution yes, but then edited their post to say they were back to trouble again...
So we decided to halp!

just got this problem a few minutes ago and I remember seeing this thread. Bumping up in case it happens to someone else.
mine also happened after a system update on my computer

update: I used Rosebine's links and now my game's back to normal