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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 6th Sep 2020 at 12:01 PM
Default Sims 3/4 on Macbook with Bootcamp
Hi!
I play TS3 on an old Macbook and the game is incredibly laggy, always has been, even when my laptop was brand new, and now it's much worse of course. I know that it's not optimised for Macs, so now that I am going to buy a new Macbook I'm wondering if I should install Windows through bootcamp to play Sims 3 (and probably Sims 4 too!).

If anyone has tried that, could you please share your experience: is the performance indeed better and how much space did you partition for Windows? I prefer to use all extensions and a lot of CC and if I try bootcamp I'm also planning to install various useful programs for CC and stuff like Reshade.
I imagine it must be a lot of GB to install both games and all this stuff. And as far as I know you can only partition the disk once.

The model I am going to buy is Macbook Pro 2019 16' with 16GM of RAM and 512 GB of disk space.
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Test Subject
Original Poster
#3 Old 6th Sep 2020 at 10:55 PM
Quote: Originally posted by nitromon
Did they ever finish that 64 bit Sims 3 for Mac? If not, it really doesn't matter since it only uses 2GB of ram. So I would say wait for the release. I haven't been keeping up, but last time I read it was in January and then the whole pandemic and I think the progress slowed down.


I am not sure what are you talking about. Is the new version going to be made specifically for Macs (and not just run through cider or whatever that's called), have in-game vsync and so on?
I've read a lot of arguments in favor of bootcamp option and I'm especially interested in it because of Reshade and programs for editing and sorting custom content which don't exist for Macs. So I'm leaning towards this option, but I am mainly worried about disc space.
Mad Poster
#5 Old 7th Sep 2020 at 12:57 AM Last edited by igazor : 7th Sep 2020 at 5:29 AM.
On the macOS side: A new MacBook Pro today would most likely ship with Catalina for the OS. That knocks TS3 for Mac right out of the water as Catalina (and Big Sur, which will be released soon) will not run 32-bit applications period. Thus the current 2 GB restriction would no longer apply because the game would never install or be able to run in the first place. Apple removed the support for 32-bit applications entirely with the release of Catalina after a year or two of warnings. If you can find a Mac that is still shipping with Mojave, the prior OS, then we might have a different conversation.

Unlike TS3, TS4 for Mac is native to the OS, is 64-bit, and doesn't present any of these issues. I've never really played TS4 beyond the free CAS trial many years ago so can't really vouch for its performance, but I've also never heard of TS4 players suffering from EA's ridiculous deployment decisions like those trying to play TS3 have been subjected to for so many years. In other words, I would expect TS4 should run about the same either way.

On the new version of TS3 for Mac under development by EA that will run in a 64-bit only environment, we don't really know if the Cider implementation is being undone and the 2 GB limit is being lifted or if this is simply going to be a means to trick the crippled older version to somehow run on Catalina and higher. All we can do at this point is guess and hope for the best as EA is not revealing any details on what they are actually doing. All we know is that once per month a Guru shows up on EA's AHQ board to give us an update. The last one was a couple of weeks ago, the project has been slowed down by the pandemic and various technical issues (no surprises there), and is still being worked on. No revised ETA yet, but we're hoping for by the end of 2020, maybe. It may well take longer.

On the Bootcamp side: there we would be talking about running TS3 for Windows natively so TS3 for Mac, either version, becomes irrelevant. I would recommend at least 256 GB for the Win partition and even that's kind of tight depending on how quickly you accumulate game saves, content and other downloads, and what other uses you may have for this end of the system. My current partition is much larger than that, but I have a 1 TB drive to work with on my iMac and plenty of external storage for other uses. On my prior Mac, my Win partition was around 370 GB, some oddball size like that, and I found it limiting but not to the point of despair. Of course the larger the Win partition is, the smaller the macOS one becomes, so some thought about future use patterns and external storage does become required. There's often no one right answer.

Performance on TS3 for Windows will then depend on the rest of your system hardware like any other PC. It's not clear to me which model you are looking at, but the ones with the Radeon Pro graphics cards would be great for TS3; the ones with Intel Iris are integrated and while they will of course run the game, there will likely be limits as to how well or how far you can take it just as with integrated graphics on any PC.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#6 Old 21st Sep 2020 at 12:28 AM
Quote: Originally posted by igazor
On the macOS side: A new MacBook Pro today would most likely ship with Catalina for the OS. That knocks TS3 for Mac right out of the water as Catalina (and Big Sur, which will be released soon) will not run 32-bit applications period. Thus the current 2 GB restriction would no longer apply because the game would never install or be able to run in the first place. Apple removed the support for 32-bit applications entirely with the release of Catalina after a year or two of warnings. If you can find a Mac that is still shipping with Mojave, the prior OS, then we might have a different conversation.

Unlike TS3, TS4 for Mac is native to the OS, is 64-bit, and doesn't present any of these issues. I've never really played TS4 beyond the free CAS trial many years ago so can't really vouch for its performance, but I've also never heard of TS4 players suffering from EA's ridiculous deployment decisions like those trying to play TS3 have been subjected to for so many years. In other words, I would expect TS4 should run about the same either way.

On the new version of TS3 for Mac under development by EA that will run in a 64-bit only environment, we don't really know if the Cider implementation is being undone and the 2 GB limit is being lifted or if this is simply going to be a means to trick the crippled older version to somehow run on Catalina and higher. All we can do at this point is guess and hope for the best as EA is not revealing any details on what they are actually doing. All we know is that once per month a Guru shows up on EA's AHQ board to give us an update. The last one was a couple of weeks ago, the project has been slowed down by the pandemic and various technical issues (no surprises there), and is still being worked on. No revised ETA yet, but we're hoping for by the end of 2020, maybe. It may well take longer.

On the Bootcamp side: there we would be talking about running TS3 for Windows natively so TS3 for Mac, either version, becomes irrelevant. I would recommend at least 256 GB for the Win partition and even that's kind of tight depending on how quickly you accumulate game saves, content and other downloads, and what other uses you may have for this end of the system. My current partition is much larger than that, but I have a 1 TB drive to work with on my iMac and plenty of external storage for other uses. On my prior Mac, my Win partition was around 370 GB, some oddball size like that, and I found it limiting but not to the point of despair. Of course the larger the Win partition is, the smaller the macOS one becomes, so some thought about future use patterns and external storage does become required. There's often no one right answer.

Performance on TS3 for Windows will then depend on the rest of your system hardware like any other PC. It's not clear to me which model you are looking at, but the ones with the Radeon Pro graphics cards would be great for TS3; the ones with Intel Iris are integrated and while they will of course run the game, there will likely be limits as to how well or how far you can take it just as with integrated graphics on any PC.


Thank you for such a detailed answer! I think I will also make the partition 300-something GB as I decided to get a 1TB Macbook Pro.
I am not holding out hope for a 64 version... If EA couldn't make a native version for Mac from the start, I don't believe they will do it now for a game that's more than 10 years old. So Bootcamp seems like the best option.
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