Ah, that's so sad to hear ☹️ I enjoy that the most about the game. A person has suggested some things to look into when considering a new computer, but I think they don't quite understand how heavy the Sims 3 is. I asked about one computer and they said the graphics card is basically non existant and suggested not settling for anything less than NVIDIA RTX 4070. But I don't understand why: my GTX 950M is on 20-30% anyway. The processor on the other hand is somewhere from 75-100% and the game is lagging - at all times. It seems my game does recognize the GPU: it has found it at least... The GPU obviously doesn't help much? I was wondering, if I do budget for a computer, would having 32 GB RAM make a very big difference in how much I could populate a city, or will the game not be able to even use all that RAM? Or do I need more?? o_0
Also I'm looking out for Paralives now. When it comes out, I'll be definitely looking trough reviews on the game and what kind of machine it requires. It looks so nice with all the details: reminds me of Sims 2 ^_^
@pinkdipi Sims 3 can only use about 3.7 GB memory, 4 minus some overhead. This is the mathematical limit for any 32-bit app and cannot be overcome without rewriting the game to be 64-bit. So while the system will use memory for other tasks, including running the OS, any amount of RAM over 8 GB is unnecessary and unhelpful, for Sims 3 at least, unless you plan on multitasking while playing.
This limit means that you can't really have more than a certain number of sims in any given world; how many depends in part on the world itself and in part on how long you've played it, and how many sims have been active. There's no good rule, and no hard limit. But those of us who've played for a long time sometimes develop a sense of when a save is dragging and might need to be cleaned up somewhat.
There are multiple factors that make a faster graphics card useful even when the current GPU isn't running anywhere near capacity. One of them is that Sims 3 can only use 800 MB of video memory (separate from RAM), but there is often more data that would theoretically be in VRAM. So the graphcis card ends up swapping data in and out a lot, and the speed of the GPU and its VRAM affects how quickly and efficiently this swapping happens.
I would say however that anything above a laptop RTX 3060 or 4050 isn't going to help Sims 3 much if at all. The power of an RTX 4070 would be wasted on the game on any settnigs.
Thank you so much for sharing your knowlegde with me!
