No shadows on Parallels Desktop on M1 Pro mac

@costalovesit  The missing shadows doesn't have anything to do with the unrecognized graphics card directly.  And I haven't heard of this problem happening on a Mac, but then again very few Mac users play through Parallels.  The only other examples I've seen of missing shadows all happened on Windows systems with newer AMD graphics cards.

In those cases, the fix was to run the "Sims 3 GPU Add-On Support" tool hosted on NexusMods.  You'd need to create a (free) account to download it, then you'd run it to edit graphicsrules.sgr.  This might not get your graphics chip recognized—I have no idea whether this tool supports ARM Macs—but it makes other changes that restore the shadows for systems with AMD GPUs.  In at least two of those cases, it wasn't getting the GPU recognized, which we did by hand, but running this tool that restored the shadows.  Point is, you can try it yourself and see whether it helps.

If you don't like the effects, just repair the game, which will restore the .sgr files to their original form.

If you'd like to get your GPU recognized and this tool doesn't accomplish that, please post the first 40 or so lines of deviceconfig, which is in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 3.  (Stop when you get to Options.)  You can delete your user and computer names, about 20 lines down, but the file doesn't contain any other personal info.