Mac - Pets graphics bad with highest settings

felicityfloweer  Please post a screenshot or two, and I'll compare it with my M1 MBP.  The game's handling of animal rendering has always been less than ideal, but what you're describing sounds beyond anything that normally happens on a good-enough GPU, which you definitely have.

I added it to the post!

felicityfloweer  The horse looks mostly normal to me.  Is it that the hair lies flat, or some other detail(s) that you're noticing?  How do cats and dogs look?  If you don't want to create any, load Appaloosa Plains and check out Shep Fox and the Lionheart cats—Shep has long fur, and I think at least one of those cats does as well.

I'll grab screenshots from my Mac and my Windows PC a little later.

I got the feeling the horse is "smudgy", the form of the body looks normal, but the coat is not rendered correctly. Sure, in CAS the pets always look sharper than normal, but I never noticed that big difference from in game and CAS. The "marking" should be in 4k, but it surely isn't. I'll make a picture of a dog/cat as well!

edit: cats seem to be normal, dogs as well. Just the horses look not as good. I try to make the horses more realistic so I use an hd mod, but no matter which one I try, they don't make a difference

Not sure but it might be the Mac's graphics card isn't compatiable with the sims 3 pets. Got a new PC desktop with Geforce 4060 last year, and the horse graphics is like this in game. 

felicityfloweer  The issue with the horse's mane isn't a 64-bit Sims 3 issue in general, and not an ARM issue either.  The low-resolution coat pattern may simply be a limitation of Sims 3 itself, the way that patterns on clothing can look perfectly sharp in CAS and completely blurred in live mode.  I don't pay enough attention to know what things look like on my gaming PC but will check when I have time.

For reference, I took these on my M1 Max MacBook Pro:

GooGoo Marshall (still a foal):

Willow and Bramble Fox (and Shep):

Bramble's mane looks a bit weird, but only at that angle, and it's because the hair is standing up a little.

If you'd like me to check your horse, feel free to save it (or the household) to the bin, upload the file somewhere, and post or PM me a link.  Saved households are in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 3 > Library; sims (and pets) saved as templates in CAS are in SavedSims.  The Library files will have random names, but you can rename them as you want as long as they still end in .package.

Forgot one. I  recommend checking the advanced rendering is on and Edge Smoothing is maxed in Game option. This is important with the game graphics.