Graphically speaking, from what I have seen, it looks pretty much the same as TS2.

I run my game on a single nVidia 6800 Ultra 256, (PCI-e), and I can run my game in 1440x900 with all the settings on high/max. It runs fine save for a very slight pause when it starts/stops raining/snowing.

OK, granted, TS3 will have to render a lot more per lot than TS2 does, but I can't see this making a humungous impact on graphical performance, maybe more CPU intensive...

...which I am hoping my AMD Athlon 64x2 6000+ will cope with

All that said, a year is a long time, and I am wondering if they are waiting to see if any major new hardware becomes available. In that event, the release of TS3 could lead to some costly upgrades, as is always the case with new hardware being ludicrously priced at first...

It was said several months ago in one of the interviews that game was being geared toward low end specs.

Our best educated guesses on the system requirements for TS3 are here:

http://forums.sims2community.com/showthread.php?t=57989

The requirements will be higher than TS2, certainly, and will likely be similar to the requirements for Spore.

I'm sure when the actual requirements are released, someone will share that with us. I'm going to go ahead and lock this now, though.