Sims 3 - Windows or Mac?

[ravenousllama]

Hey, I have a general question, and I hope that it won't start too much of a conversation.

I've been looking to buy the Sims 3 for some time, but I'm unsure of whether I should buy it for Windows or for Mac. My Mac has the newest 9400M chip so graphically it should be capable, however based on my horrific experiences with Sims 2 on this very computer I'm a little skeptical about its sequel. I'm running Windows 7 via Boot Camp and most of my games are already installed there, but I've been attempting to gradually shift my games over to the Mac side since rebooting to access my games is a hassle and I'm concerned about performance whilst using a virtualisation environment such as Parallels or VMware.

Has anyone had extensive performance issues with the Sims 3 on the Mac side? Would just sticking to the graphics capability of DirectX versus the hit-or-miss OpenGL be better? I'm undecided, and I certainly haven't got the money for both.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

 

[matthewscott661]

The DVD for the Sims 3 comes with both installers, Windows and OS X. So you can try them both and decide for yourself which one works best.

 

[ravenousllama]

Ah, I was not aware of that. Still, it's also a preference issue. I'm looking for some community feedback.

This would be the third game I've installed thus far on my Mac side other than Warcraft III and RCT3.

 

[Doobz]

My macbook pro plays it without any issue, but I use the 9600 for the game, so I can't really tell you right now how the 9400M does. Either way, if the game doesn't play so well on the mac side, can't you just reinstall it on the windows side without a problem?

 

[ravenousllama]

My macbook pro plays it without any issue, but I use the 9600 for the game, so I can't really tell you right now how the 9400M does. Either way, if the game doesn't play so well on the mac side, can't you just reinstall it on the windows side without a problem?

Yeah, I could. The biggest thing was that I wasn't aware, as @matthewscott661 pointed out, that the DVD includes both the Mac and Windows installers, which is unusual in my experience for EA to do. I'm just going to buy it and install it on both and see which runs smoother.