So I know if you are only running a few expansions at one time you get better performance (I use any game starter) but so far I have university, seasons, and late night running pretty smoothly. I want to add one or two more packs to my game in the future. I'm curious to see what your guys' specs are and how many expansions you run and your performance.
I'm running 64 bit windows 7 service pack 1, 4gb ram, nvidia gtx 260 and an intel Pentium dual cpu.

Also have about 20 mods, thinking about putting buckley hair CC back in my game. Other than that, no CC.

• AMD Vishera FX-6300 @ 4.1Ghz OC'd
• 24GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
• nVidia GeForce GTX 750Ti
• 7200RPM 1TB SATA II HDD
• Windows 8.1 64-Bit
• All EPs, HELS, FLS, & OLS
• 1.17Gbs mods folder size. 528 files total.

Average 55-60fps small lesser-populated worlds. 48-50fps average in Medium-Large sized with decent amounts of population. 7-minute load time from .exe click to game world.

I have a Toshiba laptop from 2010. I decided I wanted to enjoy the Sims 3 and minimize the struggles on my system and my frustration while enjoying the EPs I own. Too many mods and lots of CC went out the window this January when I installed: The base game, Generations, Ambitions (my new ep from Christmas), Late Night, and Seasons. I keep most of the settings low or medium except for my Sims who are on high. I want them to look clear in photos. So far I have a few minor mods back in the game (like removing the censor patch). I also have a little bit of CC. My game loads fast (within 5 minutes) to my saved neighborhood in Twinbrook (comes with Ambitions). So far the game runs very well but there are the usual "in game" glitches. I'm just going to enjoy all the stuff that comes with the EPS and if I get bored, recolor items with the palette. I am sure I will get bored but right now it's going well. I also don't play "a lot" (too busy) so that help keep it all fresh.

My laptop has the following specs:

• Windows 10 with 16GB

• Intel Core i7-4702MQ @ 2.20GHz

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M with 4GB

• 1TB Hard disk and a 110MB SSD on which Sims 3 is installed

I use CC Magic for most of my CC.
In my Package and Overrides folder is 202MB
I have 975MB in the DCCache folder, 718MB in the InstalledWorld folder and 5,11GB in my CC Magic folder.
I use almost all mods from Nraas and many script mods made by Icarus and other modders.
I don't have Movie, Katy Perry's Sweet Treats, Diesel Stuff Packs. I have all Expansion Packs except Pets and Into the Future.

Most of my settings are on high and my game runs well enough except when Overwatch is doing its cleanup but that is just temporary.

Tower case
Win 7
i7 4790k liquid cooled overclocked to 4.8 GHz
16 GB Ram
Nvidia 770 GTX
500 GB Samsung SSD for the c: drive

Sims 3 with all EPs, and a bunch of SPs. Mods + DCCache ~20 GB.

Runs fine but I can still get little lags and glitches. No matter how much hardware you throw at it, the game engine has issues, and the 32 bit limited footprint takes a toll if you have a large town and lots of cc.But it certainly runs well enough to enjoy, and I have all my cc eye candy on screen. However, my legacies frequently do move to new towns between generations, keeping me from one, being bored staying in one town, and two, from getting massively overbloated saves that slowly but surely get corrupted as the generations move on.

Sometimes I have an issue with speed 3 when it comes to running the game smoothly. How is it for you guys?

Smoothly, compared to what? Sonic The Hedgehog, or the surface of Mars?
This game will always have hiccups. It's not completely smooth for anyone.

A bit choppy. Average around 20fps on that speed. 1 and 2 are fine though.

There is a gameflow xml that a user named CyberBob discovered when ts3 first came out.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<base>
<Current_Tuning>
<kNormalTimeRate value="1" />
<kDoubleTimeRate value="3" />
<kTripleTimeRate value="20" />
<kSkipTimeRate value="20" />
<kSlowMotionMultiplier value="0.25" />
</Current_Tuning>
<Deprecated_Tuning />
</base>


I'm going to try changing these numbers and see if it makes speed 3 faster.

Edit: changed triple time rate and skip time rate to 100 and it seems to work so far, I'm getting up to 60 fps on speed 3

I dabbled in a gameplay data file, which is called gameflow.xml. I changed some numbers in attempt to help speed 3 run faster. There is a mts thread about changing that file here: http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=354281
It was done about a month after the game came out. The creator hasn't updated the mod since. I'll upload my file here.
I'm curious if anyone notices a difference in speed 3 and ultra speed with the changes I made to the numbers.

hm... speed 3 always is somewhat "chopping", particulary while sims grows in number - obviously game is trying to process more data in less (less "fake-dull-seconds") time. And FPS are definitelly not a factor for anything related with real game efficiency, until you have very bad or very good GPU ^^ I can easily get more than 60 frames on rather "lowbudget" laptop* which proves exactly nothing, well maybe my low respect of health of this machine. While actual playing I locked fps at 25 and it's quite enough, it's not a Counter Strike guys, even with Ani's The Bear.

I observed than switching for 2 makes game run smoother and virtually "faster" (it'snot "faster" just seems to be ) during sims "choppy-sleep-time".

*

I've been able to play very smoothly with the entire collection installed on my laptop and it dosen't lag at all most of the time unless my hard drive is due to get defragmented.

I always run into issues at some point. I don't mind speed 3 not running smoothly. But at some point I either notice somewhat slower loading of textures after switching houses a lot. Or that animations start becoming a bit choppy. This is a pet peeve, because I hate any kind of delay. And probably because I am so annoyed by it, I maybe tend to notice it sooner then others would While others maybe are a bit more forgiving if it comes to TS3.

Anyway, I never install all ep's anymore and usually limit myself to official neighbourhoods that have routing fixes (thanks Ellacharmed :p). To keep CAS somewhat fast, I combine CAS CC into packages. And ofc I use the NRAAS mods that help with performance a lot. If I would run TS3 with all ep's and no mods and then use some random EA neighbourhood, I would probably ragequit before being able to play an hour. I also doubt that this can run smoothly on any pc.

when i had a normal laptop, i could not play for long stretches without crashing to desktop. since getting a gaming laptop, game runs perfect with all expansions and stuff pack, tons of cc hair. but i have nraas error trap and overwatch as well.

It runs better than on my previous computer, but not at the best of it's potential. I mean, I know crashes happen to everyone even for inexplicable reasons such as a power outage or a flicker, or too many apps running in the background. BUT it takes at least forty minutes for me to get into my game and that is with 4GB of my 8GB RAM allowed to it, but I do have like 20,000+ CC items installed, package and Sims3Pack alike.... sooo..

Honestly, if it takes 40 minutes to start up the game, you have bad cc in your collection. Even under the best of circumstances load times aren't exactly fast, but 40 minutes is almost invariably because some piece of cc is busted. I know trying to winnow it out can be a pain, but no worse (to me, at least) than a 40 minute load. At a minimum, have you at least run Dashboard against everything? As careful as I am with what I download, I've discovered silly stuff like a TS2 package file accidentally downloaded and installed, with sudden "Gee, it never used to take this long to load" thoughts quickly banished.

That is a good idea, I am going to take a look into that. I was suspecting something but didn't check... yet! I'll let you know what Dashboard finds though, thanks for suggesting that.

Win 10
i7 4790 3.6GHz
32GB RAM
1TB SSD HD for game installs
NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Black 16GB

No problems running all expansions, plus NRAAS and massive set of packages and downloads here. Once in a while I'll get a few seconds of texture loads when I'm switching around lots of environments, but it's not that out of hand. Honestly, even when I was on a lower-end system a few years ago, it was rarely the expansions that caused issues. Like eskie said, it's more often bad or conflicting custom content/mods. I did find that using the Awesomemod to clean up the neighborhood at 3am for unroutable sims, deleting unused cars, and managing non-attended lots running tv/radio helped a lot, too.

A Nvidia TITAN with 16 GB VRAM and it still takes a few seconds for texture loads? Damn their code is poorly optimized. I get about the same with the 770GTX. Originally, I was going to throw another one in for SLI, then the 900 series came out and tempted me, and then I realized that as long as I played everything at only 1080p and am not upgrading monitors anytime soon, my frame rates in all my games were just fine. Still a flash of envy, though.

I haven't used Awesome in many years, but it does a nightly cleanup like NRaas Overwatch does as well? Good to know. And yes, stuff like AM/Overwatch/ScriptError can go a long way to improving overall performance. If you can keep your saves clean, use "repaired" maps for EA worlds (thanks ellacharmed!), and custom worlds that are well made without major routing issues, it really can run just fine.

Oh, you're right, eskie. Yeah, it's the Overwatch that does the clean-up; not Awesomemod. And I rarely get texture pops--just those moments when I'm bouncing between sims in multiple locations. Doesn't help that I pretty much CASt all of my home objects. All-leather housing all the time! (Even leather walls? Yes.)

With the NRAAs mods that have been mentioned in this thread I get the game to run mostly smoothly on my PC at 30 FPS and the graphics at very high detail level. The only NRAAs mod that I have never been able to get to work is master controller. I even tried to reinstall the game and make it the only mod I had installed and still every time the game refuses to launch if I have it installed. Still that is a minor issue and I have not had real problems in a while.

Now that being said at some point every save file(Even if I clean it)crashes and becomes unusable and I have to start over but again it's not as bad as it was when I first started playing last year.

Looks like I spoke too soon, now my game has started on all of the files refusing to let the Supernatural Sims I create do anything Supernatural. The NPC Sims are fine but the any time I try to control the sims the fairies lose their wings, the vampires don't act like vampires, and the werewolves refuse to transform. Given that this expansion pack cost as much as a new playstation game did when I was a kid and EA has had plenty of time to patch it there is no excuse for this.

I am sick and tired of having to reinstall this game every time I play it and then being lucky if it runs for half an hour without screwing up. EA lied on the box about the system requirements and then they didn't even debug the game or patch it in any meaningful way so as far as I am concerned The Sims 3 is an act of fraud and nothing else and EA's CEO and board of directors should spend time in prison for releasing this garbage. I mean just look at the help section of this forum and the number of fan made mods that exist just to fix bugs in the game, bugs that never should have existed in a full price release to begin with.

The worst part is I don't want to write off the money I spent on this game so I am going to put in the work to try and fix it and that means not only reinstalling the game(Which I just finished doing) but I will also have to restart all of my files. This game is so close to being good but the fact that EA didn't give a dead rat's behind if it would run at all sinks this game and I am surprised there was a Sims 4 after this disaster. Selling something like this that never worked should be against the law, plane and simple.

I am sorry to be so negative but I am just stressed out, this isn't a game, it's a full time job just to get the thing running and then it doesn't even work.