Spockthewok (aka Will Nixon) wrote a master's thesis on pink flashing, figured out the cause and potentially found the first genuine fix.
The fix itself (along with the thesis for those interested) can be found here:
A patch to fix the 'pink soup' bug in The Sims 2. Contribute to spockthewok/TS2MemCapRemover development by creating an account on GitHub.
Author of the mod discovered that memory-usage-related pink soup is a result of an intentional safety check in the game's code, rather than a mistake in calculating texture memory.
So his experimental mod for TS2 RPC launcher basically tells the game to stop freaking out and turning stuff pink when shaders' memory usage goes over certain threshold. NOTE: it may get rid of the pink, but the game will still crash if you exceed 4GB limit.
There are two mod options to choose from:
Version 1 is more radical, it completely removes the safety check. You'll (probably) find out the shader's memory limit has been exceeded when your game crashes.
Version 2 is supposed to allow some pink soup at around 3.5 GB memory usage, near the danger zone, so you have time to act - so obviously, this one sounds more sensible.
And while I remain convinced that pink soup can occur because of other shader-related issues or f*cked-up memory settings, not just this "failsafe", if your game suffers from pink soup it's definitely worth a try!
So far, various and fairly rigorous testing on my end and by members of the community have been reporting success 🎉🎉
Oh btw I might also spread the word about this lil mod here:
I think I had a good chance to test it out yesterday, as I was filming in a *VERY* heavily decorated 'hood and had to travel between multiple lots in a row - usually my game would go nuts after like 5 minutes into this hustle, but this time nothing happened so I suppose the mod is doing its ~magic~ very well!













