soocoolsim I would guess that at least some of these players were using the Task Manager workaround for the Alder Lake issue, and lifting the limit at the Main Menu or later, meaning the game was loading at least part of the time with access to only one CPU core. Removing that limit would make the game load much faster. Forgetting to lift the one-core limit at all would make the game lag a lot.
The only other good reason I can think of that Sims 3 would run better is if someone's antivirus somehow objected to the Alder Lake patch (or its effects) enough to slow things down, but not enough to block the executable outright. This can happen, but it seems to be very uncommon, at least from what I've seen in general. The update coming directly from EA might prevent the AV from interfering.
As for the rest... wishful thinking, maybe? Or players reapplied other changes to the game's program files that the update removed or reverted, and they did it better this time around? It's hard to say.
