Game Settings With most modern machines you're able to set all the graphics settings to high and enjoy the scenery. In each section, we try a wide variety of hardware and report performance results with a dose of our own in-game experience mixed in. We've divided our guide into four sections: video card, game settings, CPU, and memory. The Sims 2 pushes certain computer components to their limits, but tweaking some of the settings and an upgrade or two will help you get the game in playable shape. Even with the best hardware, none of our testbeds proved to be entirely hitch or stutter free while moving the camera. As soon as you stop moving the camera, the game smoothes out. You really only need 20-30fps to watch your sims, but frame rates plummet once you try to move the camera around. For each test, we performed our minute-long circuit three times and took the most consistent results reported by Fraps.įrame rates don't matter too much in this game since there isn't a whole lot of fast-paced sims action. We went from room to room in a set circular order as we checked up on our little sims, pausing at each spot for a few seconds.
Other houses and areas of the game could be more taxing, but for the sake of simplicity, we chose a moderately sized house with four sims in it. To try to minimize variance, we limited our input to simply moving the camera around in a set pattern across the Cappulet house, a preset house that comes with the game. It also makes it impossible to create an entirely reproducible benchmark. The built-in automation hits the CPU hard and affects performance considerably. They'll even interact with each other and have conversations independent of any action on your part.
You can manage one of your sims, but the rest will go along their merry ways, painting, jumping up and down, and making repeated visits to the restroom. If you've played The Sims 2, you know that the sims pretty much have a mind of their own. The gaming benchmark rulebook dictates that each individual run needs to be reproducible and provide stable frame rates. Testing The Sims 2 has proven to be quite difficult.
The Sims 2 lives and breathes on raw CPU power of course, copious amounts of RAM never hurt either. You can play the game on a GeForce 7800 GTX and a GeForce 6600 GT and you won't notice a difference in performance. It would honestly be hard to find another game that depended less on the video card. But with The Sims 2, you can kick that whole way of thinking to the curb. With most games, you can get away with upgrading your graphics to squeeze out better performance. The Sims 2 runs contrary to the normal gaming upgrade model that usually calls for a bigger video card.
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