Sims 1 Legacy - Bad UI scaling on 4K/high DPI screen

Question

I have a 3840x2160 (4K) screen. When I launch Sims 1 Legacy Collection (Windows 11, Steam) the UI is oversized and pixelated, as if it were a tiny 800x600 screen.

Only when I manually set Windows to 1920x1080 resolution does the Legacy Collection's updated UI scaling take effect, where text is not pixelated, much more readable, and the UI takes up less screen space.

EA documentation says the release contains "updates for more versatile pixel resolution scaling on large monitors". It seems to only be working for 1920x1080, no larger.

I am in no way expecting a 25 year old game to be pixel perfect native 4K, but it seems to be a bug that unless the screen resolution is set to exactly 1920x1080, the UI is scaled back up and difficult to view on high DPI screens. For a 2025 release I have freshly paid for, I should not have to manually set and unset my screen resolution in Windows to view it properly.

See examples below. Here it doesn't seem like much difference but view them full screen on a 4K monitor to see what I'm talking about.

Windows natively to 3840x2160 scale
Bad - oversized UI, blurry text, pixelated object sprites

Windows manually set to 1920x1080
Good - UI as optimised for new release, legible text, better pixel scaling for sprites. But I had to manually set this before launching the game

0qwj5ct4kaqr · Answer

How do you manually change the resolution? I've tried entering commands for the "Advanced Launch Options" in the "View Properies" in the EA app. My native is 1980x 1080 and I tried switching&nbsp;to 1024×768&nbsp;but the commands I've tried doesn't work properly.

kelseya1994 · Answer

Change the resolution and scale in your computers display settings, in settings

jau_cr · Answer

I think the "blurry scaling" is how it's supposed to work in the 2025 release. The scaling doesn't work in 1080p so the zooming doesn't work as intended (the game looks more zoomed out than it should be) and, while the UI is less blurry, the proportions are tiny and it's hard to read. I honestly think a mix between the crisp font/icons and the new proportions would be the perfect thing.

rambley_raccoon · Answer

What's the best setting to make the UI larger in Sims 1 Legacy? Right now,mine is set at 1920 x 1080.

castigavi · Answer

The "blurry pixelated big UI" is actually the correct one I believe. The one that you find correct is smaller than what the UI used to be in original The Sims. The "incorrect" one is what it used to be in the vanilla game.

I agree though that the UI is pixelated and messy looking. I don't reallly understand why EA didn't fix the buttons to show correctly on higher resolutions. Half of the buttons in the game have wrong background now so it looks jarring. I also hoped they'd upscale neighbourhood/expansion lots screens so they'd take entire screen space instead of having the black border around everything. It's honestly quite disappointing esp. since the guy behind FreeSO somehow managed to make The Sims Online UI work great on widescreen monitors AND improved graphics greatly while at it. It can be done, it just requires care from the developers.

Also I don't quite understand the reasoning behind using TS1 Complete Collection's rather ugly loading screen instead of the original one from the base game but I guess that's more of a taste question.

Forum Discussion

Sims 1 Legacy - Bad UI scaling on 4K/high DPI screen

5 Replies

About The Sims Franchise Discussion

Recent Discussions

The Sims 1 Crashes on Launch

Sims 1 does not launch

Sims 2 Crashes during playing it?

Sims 25th Birthday Bundle issues

will ts2 legacy collection work on mac