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The Sims is the best selling PC game franchise of all time. That is no hyperbole. If you count the myriad mass of expansion packs from the first and second game, The Sims has sold over 100 million units worldwide. To put this in perspective, that's about 3 copies for each person in Canada!
Since The Sims 3 will undoubtedly be almost as popular as The Sims 2 – or perhaps even more popular – we thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the engine powering this attractive new entry to the series. This time around, The Sims 3 has gained some graphic enhancements, so it takes a bit more juice under the hood to really get things going smoothly, compared to the second or first game in the series.
Overall, of course, the requirements for this game are relatively low, compared to most other PC games in 2009. But at the same time, many fans of The Sims aren't hardcore PC gamers, so they will be playing the game with more modest equipment. That is why we are going to see how much performance we can squeeze out of the game's engine, without sacrifcing too much eye candy.
This article has two main goals. The first, is to go through the game's visual quality settings, option by option, to see which ones cause the biggest performance hits, and how they look when changed. The second goal is to take this information, and come up with a 'Neo-recommend' setting to use to play The Sims 3, which will find a balance between looks and performance, for those of you that don't have a killer $2000 gaming computer on your desk.
This article is more aimed towards the casual gaming crowd, or hardware neophyte, than it is the more hardcore crowd wanting to know if a HD 4870 X2 gets 50 or 60 frames more than a HD 4850 X2 in the game (if that didn't make sense to you, then that's great, stick around and read the rest of the article!) We wanted to take a look at gaming performance with video cards under the $80 mark.
Is it worth turning off mirror reflections for the extra amount frames? Is a 'medium' setting good for in-game textures? These are the kind of questions this article will endeavor to answer.
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Neat to see the screenshots of each of the settings at the end..now I know what I'm not missing.
http://en.inpai.com.cn/doc/enshowcont.asp?id=6307
Thanks for the heads up Jmke.
I loved the screen shots too.
I have 4 questions:
1) What were the names of the budget cards you benchmarked? (rather than the names of their GPUs)
2) The budget PC I'm building has 2GB DDR2 800mhz RAM, you said your test machine had DDR3 RAM, will the difference in RAM cause a significant drop in frames rates?
3) A Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 HDMI 512mb DDR 3 memory has a 60 db fan - do you know the loudness for a Sapphire Radeon 4650 512mb DDR 2?
4) If the cooling fan for the Sapphire Radeon 4650 512mb DDR2 was 60 db, do you think this loudness would be irritating enough to justify getting a less powerful, quieter card like a 9500GT 512mb DRR2?
1) Palit 9600 GSO Sonic, ATI / review sample HD 4650, ATI / review sample HD 4550, XFX 8600 GTS XXX, no name/ no brand 9500 GT, Diamond Multimedia HD 3450 512MB. Those are off of memory but pretty sure it is correct.
2) This won't me much of a problem. Actually DRR3 at slower speeds (<1000MHz) often performs quite close to DDR2 of the same speeds. DDR2 at 800MHz is fine for Sims 3. Not many games benefit from high speed RAM as much as you might think, though this will change in about a year...
3) I don't know the loudness of the fan of that card but if it actually has DDR2 (which I'm surprised to hear) that I would stay away from it irregardless of noise.
4) No. But it is up to you how big of a deal the sound is. But beware you can get totally silent, faster video cards. Such as for instance Gigabyte makes many passively cooled, decently powered video cards. (This is probably more than you want to spend , but for an example : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125274 if you look around you might be able to get a passive Gigabyte 8600 GT for much less, or something like that. )
Also I would not recommend getting a 9500 GT. You are better off getting a 8600 GT / GTS for about the same price, or even something like a HD 3850 which can be had for not much more at all, and is significantly faster.
Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz
4GB DDR2 RAM 800MHz
GeForce 8800GT 512MB
22" LCD - 1680 X 1050
Thanks in advance.
On the page 11 benchmarks, what resolution are you using?
I've got -
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.0GHz
Memory: 3070MB RAM
Video Card: ATI Radeon 4550
Memory: 1024.0 MB
I've downloaded the patch for Sims 3 & also set my settings according to the Performance Guide. It's still crashing after maybe a min. or two of play. Thanks in advance, Patty
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