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Sims3 Win or OSX - my thoughts so far

A

aki

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 2, 2004
688
0
Japan
well i installed sims under osx and i have to say its mixed.....

two things first im on imac 3.06 with the 8800gs and 4gb ram....i thought performance would be between good and excellent....and actually its more like good enough but not good.....on max settings and resn it looks nice but laggy and choppy....on default settings it is better framerates generally and no lag but still some chop in town view

i expected better performance overall as my hardware is not so old and sims is meant to be graphically "only average" in terms of features not some bleeding edge fps

one other big thing is antialiasing....there isnt any.....if anyone can correct this thats great but from what i see there is no ingame antialiasing and even on high resolution settings jaggies are distracting

so i will try installing it on bootcamp i guess and see if the performance is different and try the videocard control panel antialiasing thing

im guessing there are 3 factors here

1) no antialiasing features in OSX :(
2) cider ports are always going to be slower
3) sims 3 isnt super optomized to start with its a sim not a fps and EA's attention went to other things than lean graphics code

interested to hear any other thoughts from osx users... i wonder how much of a hit to perf antialiasing will be under windows
 
You'll want to run it in Vista for:

1. Better performance
2. AA support (edge smoothing)
3. AF support (distant texture detail) - this needs to be enabled in the nVidia control panel

Honestly, the convenience of having it right there on OS X isn't worth it at all if you want to get everything you can out of the game. My Mac is worse than yours graphically, and it can handle AA and AF at 1920x1200 very well.
 
yeah, the missing antialiasing feature for OS X got me too. Overall it seems to run at roughly the same speed on os x and win (xp) for me but so far I prefer to run it on win xp because I can get to visuals to be a bit smoother; that and I have never had a ported version of anything work well for me...
 
Other than the FSAA and other graphical things, I've found that time progresses a ton slower on the fastest speed on the mac version than windows.
 
Crap, Cider port? Damn that sucks, oh well going to buy PC version then. Maybe this is the problem why Mac games don't sell as well as their PC brothers, cause even Mac users will buy PC version due to how the game sort of deteriorate when run on Mac compared to PC, this must be some sort of game developer conspiracy with Microsoft against Mac, LOL (the last sentence was seriously a joke :D)
 
I got mine off Direct2Drive, so I'm not sure whether there is a Windows version in the same download. I think I'm screwed in terms of getting a refund or something.

The Mac version runs like ass. Seems like another lousy port. Looks like I wasted like $42. Plus I'm sick of it already and I've only had it for like two days. Probably because of the subpar graphics and performance. No shadows, no antialiasing, horrible lighting, despite there being an option for full shader effects. Even at max settings. And my early 2008 MBP 15-inch with 3gb of RAM exceeds the game requirements. Totally misleading. We were never told that the mac version would be essentially crippled in terms of graphics.

I want my money back, but I think I'm screwed. Should have bought the actual box. Then if worse comes to worst I could have sold the game back as used and gotten at least something back.

It's EA, after all . . . what did you expect?? Half-ass the OS X version, but charge those customers the same amount.

Here's what else is keeping them busy:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hmKyub7zU5NelM_NYJ-JxSMkvBWAD98KF7880 :rolleyes:


EDIT:

No refunds from Direct2Drive. I could always reverse the charges to my credit card, but that would take a while and is really a big pain in the ass to do.

The game should run as intended under WinXP. I just happen to have a copy of XP SP2. So now I get to go through the whole process of installing XP under Boot Camp in order to run a game I bought specifically to run on OS X. Wonderful.

If I didn't have a copy of Windows (by all rights you shouldn't need one if the game runs as it should on OS X), then that's an extra what, $60-$100 expense just to run a game.

ROFL. Pathetic.
 
I installed this on my sisters Macbook a few days ago (Black mid-07 model) under XP and despite the GMA950 not being supported it runs VERY well (30+ fps except for 5 seconds after it loads the game). This I find surprising considering The Sims 2 ran much worse than this.
 
as LTD says there are more facty threads around on this now but just to cap my personal experience....

i installed on vista and much better

basically its the perf i would expect from the hardware i have

good antialiasing and not jumpy laggy stuff

the mac port is really a bit of a cheat by EA i think

very sad :(
 
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