The Sims 3
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Publisher: Electronic Arts Genre(s): Life Simulation Home Page: http://thesims3.ea.com/
Running The Sims 3EA has again bumped up the system requirements for The Sims series. While The Sims 2 left many complaining back in 2004 due to the requirement for hardware Transform & Lighting - a feature missing from many laptops back then - The Sims 3 sets the bar at DirectX9 Shader Model 2.0 support. These days this isn't much - even most laptops made in the past couple of years can meet that requirement. On the CPU side, a Pentium 4 2.0Ghz is theoretically enough.
Unfortunately the practical requirements are a tad higher. While it is possible to play the game on the listed minimum system, on slower systems you run into a funny problem. The fast forward options are limited by your system performance. On slower systems, even the fastest fast forward may not speed the game much at all - and you'll end up having to watch your Sim sleep for 3-5 minutes per game day while a 10-second fast-forwarded bath can take over a minute on a slow system. Dropping down the visuals helps to a degree, and you can also try to minimize the issue by moving the camera so it is zoomed close to a patch of grass where nothing happens - clumsy and even then on slower systems the fast forward is often crawling slower than it should. This is probably because the simulation has to keep running and keeping track of everyone in town, not just your Sim - and the whole task is probably fairly harsh on the processor. Not an issue at normal speed, but when you begin fast forwarding, everything adds up. If you add up all the processing power taken by the visuals normally shown on screen, low end systems just can't take the load when fast forwarding the time. The engine seems to be abusing mostly the CPU, so as long as your processor is fairly modern, you can get away with a cheaper video card - if not, you probably need a whole new system as upgrade of the processor alone is rarely practical. EA has so far been silent on this issue, so I have to assume that the game is "working as intended". So, unless your system is fast (something like the YouGamers Recommended specification), you may very well run into problems. It does not prevent you from playing, but it gets very annoying due to the fact that you tend to spend two thirds of each in-game day fast forwarding. Ten minutes of waiting, fifteen minutes of gameplay, ten minutes of waiting... Low end systems also suffer from some performance issues when you scroll around the town. The workaround is to always zoom out to a town view and then zoom back to the point of interest you want to look at. That way there is no need to load and unload all the data and art related to the buildings you scroll past. No amount of upgrading really fixes the issue completely - even high end gaming PCs can stutter when moving the camera at close maginification. Visual QualityVisually high end systems do not gain much (and low end systems do not lose much) when tweaking the settings. At lowest settings you won't get reflections from mirrors or proper shadows and lighting but otherwise things look surprisingly close to the maximum settings when viewing the game from a camera perspective most often used to play the game. You really have to zoom up close to see noticeable benefit from higher detail settings and going really up close is useful only when taking screenshots or making videos.
 At the low end, lighting effects and shadows are gone. Still, the game looks quite acceptable even at minimum settings (runs fine on YouGamers Minimum system).
Related Stuff Games: The Sims 3
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