My wife loves the sims, and when 3 came out we went right to the store to buy it, and while it was "playable" on our old laptop, it was not the optimal experience. The thing about the old laptop though, was it was right about the recommended specs, and still performed poorly. She only plays the Sims every once in a while, but when she does, she goes hardcore and downloads all sorts of user made stuff for it and makes huge houses and whatnot, then not touch it for months.
Well she decided she wanted to play it again, and we have gotten a new laptop since the last time she played, this one being way more than capable for such an older game. We used it to play Diablo 3 together, and I could get good frames with Skyrim on high settings. I installed Sims 3 yesterday, and you know what? It runs like crap! I had to turn down a bunch of settings, but it gets a really bad screen tearing when moving the camera around. When actually playing the game, its choppy as hell and really not running well. Looking online, it seems that many people have the same issue with the game running badly on more than capable systems, but no one has a legit fix. I installed the Sims 2, and maxed out the settings and it looks better than 3 did with the down graded settings!
Anyone else have this issue? Is it just a poorly optimized game?
Why does the sims 3 run so bad?
Why does the sims 3 run so bad?
My trade thread, updated 7/14
http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... 48#p421248
http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... 48#p421248
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tintinmayo
- 24-bit
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Re: Why does the sims 3 run so bad?
Most likely it's a combo of the game being unoptimized and many users expecting that the game will be similar to majority of PC games, which rely more on GPU. I believe the Sims is also pretty heavy on the CPU due to all the numbers it has to crunch in the background.
This could be the reason why a lot of laptop users are having trouble running it, as the system requirements were intended for desktop CPUs. Laptop CPUs are usually cut down/slower when compared to their desktop counterparts (even if they're on the same architecture and have the same clockspeed.) There are even notebook CPUs that look impressive if you just look at the numbers but actually perform very poorly because they don't support out of order execution (I have a 1.65 ghz Atom that gets trashed by a 900 mhz P3 on a lot of things, for instance).
By any chance, what are the specs on your laptop?
As for system requirements provided by publishers, I tend to take them with a grain of salt. Most of the time, minimum means the absolute minimum you need for the game to launch, even if it runs like a powerpoint slideshow. I usually consider the recommended system requirements as my minimum.
Even then, there are times where they provide generic recommendations that leave a lot of margin for error, like "3.0ghz CPU or equivalent" not taking into consideration that there are Pentium 4s in the 3.0 ghz range that won't even match a 1.8 ghz core 2 duo clock-for-clock. It's worse for videocards, they sometimes recommend things like "128 MB Video Card with support for Directx 9," which includes a lot of IGPs that aren't suitable for gaming.
The Sims 2 had the same problems when it first came out, people just don't feel it now because hardware has improved significantly. I remember being frustrated because its system requirements stated that it will run on an 800MHz cpu, but it ran like ass on my 900 mhz Celeron.
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This could be the reason why a lot of laptop users are having trouble running it, as the system requirements were intended for desktop CPUs. Laptop CPUs are usually cut down/slower when compared to their desktop counterparts (even if they're on the same architecture and have the same clockspeed.) There are even notebook CPUs that look impressive if you just look at the numbers but actually perform very poorly because they don't support out of order execution (I have a 1.65 ghz Atom that gets trashed by a 900 mhz P3 on a lot of things, for instance).
By any chance, what are the specs on your laptop?
As for system requirements provided by publishers, I tend to take them with a grain of salt. Most of the time, minimum means the absolute minimum you need for the game to launch, even if it runs like a powerpoint slideshow. I usually consider the recommended system requirements as my minimum.
Even then, there are times where they provide generic recommendations that leave a lot of margin for error, like "3.0ghz CPU or equivalent" not taking into consideration that there are Pentium 4s in the 3.0 ghz range that won't even match a 1.8 ghz core 2 duo clock-for-clock. It's worse for videocards, they sometimes recommend things like "128 MB Video Card with support for Directx 9," which includes a lot of IGPs that aren't suitable for gaming.
The Sims 2 had the same problems when it first came out, people just don't feel it now because hardware has improved significantly. I remember being frustrated because its system requirements stated that it will run on an 800MHz cpu, but it ran like ass on my 900 mhz Celeron.
.