I miss TS3 so much... will my Mac run it??

FawnFox

I used to play this game on my old Mac desktop but haven't for a few years. Now I've been hit with a wave of nostalgia and I really want to reinstall it and play! I'm just not sure if the game will run on my Macbook Pro?



Here are my specs.

Would it help to chuck all my stuff on a hard drive and factory reset the laptop? Or am I better off to install Windows on my mac and run TS3 through that?

puzzlezaddict

Unfortunately, it's highly unlikely that your laptop would be able to handle the game. It has an integrated graphics card, and not a particularly powerful one at that, where TS3's more demanding packs really require a dedicated card. Your macbook also has only 4 GB RAM. In theory, that would be enough to run things on the mac side—the game has a hard limit of 2 GB RAM in mac OS—but Sierra probably takes over half of your available RAM for itself. There might not be enough left over to let you play for any length of time. You can check your memory use on startup if you'd like to see for yourself. Go to Applications\Utilities and open the Activity Monitor to view your RAM use at any time.

Even if you Bootcamped some form of Windows onto this computer, you'd still be limited by your graphics card and RAM. If you're asking about your desktop, that might be a better option, as some of the older imacs have dedicated cards and enough RAM to support the game. (igazor plays on a 2011 model that runs all EPs well enough that he's still playing.) But of course that would depend on your specs.

igazor

My iMac, by the way, has a 2.7 GHz quad core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and an AMD Radeon 6770M graphics card. I ran out of patience with the Mac version of the game long ago, somewhere in between Pets and Seasons performance just fell apart on me on my long-running ongoing game, but knowing what I did about how poorly that version functions compared to its Windows sibling even back then it came as no surprise. New games were still fine, up to a point. I now play on a Bootcamped Win 7 partition.

The Windows version ran fine with 4 GB with all EPs except IP and ITF back then, but was using practically all of it to do so most of the time and often enough was begging for more so I upped it to 8 GB long before the final two EPs. Win 10 today is supposed to be more efficient at RAM usage, but I believe most players find it uses or reserves for use more than Win 7 ever did just routinely.

FawnFox

puzzlezaddict wrote: »

It has an integrated graphics card, and not a particularly powerful one at that, where TS3's more demanding packs really require a dedicated card. Your macbook also has only 4 GB RAM.

Even if you Bootcamped some form of Windows onto this computer, you'd still be limited by your graphics card and RAM.

Thank you for such a detailed response! I was considering upgrading my Macbook's RAM anyway for other reasons, so if I were to smash in 8/16G and a better graphics card, then bootcamped Windows, would I have better luck? (lmao anything for the sims)

igazor wrote: »

I ran out of patience with the Mac version of the game long ago

Relatable.
Did your graphics card come with the Mac or did you upgrade to that?

FawnFox

Oh wait I can't update my laptop's graphics card, can I?

igazor

@FawnFox - Shipped with it. It wasn't the highest end iMac of that year's models but wasn't on the lower end either.

I'm afraid we can't upgrade graphics cards on MacBook Pros or iMacs. Very few laptops can take a graphics card upgrade, Macs are no exception in this case. The decision of which model/which card has to be made at the time of purchase. On iMacs, that part of the system isn't even reachable once the unit is ready to be shipped out, only the RAM slots are. On many newer Macs, even the RAM can't be upgraded because, as I understand it, everything comes fused together -- this currently varies by model but those of us with older Macs tend to not have that problem (for at least as long as our systems hold together mechanically).

I'm sorry, but I don't think you have strong prospects for a decent TS3 experience on that MacBook Pro. No matter which way you approach things, you still have weak integrated graphics. The base game and a small number of the earliest released EPs with game options not set very high might about as far as you can take things on either operating system even with more RAM added. That's fine, of course, if you would be happy with that but if you would also like to try TS2 you might be able to take that game much further. Might a newer system with stronger components be reachable for you, if not right now, in the future?

FawnFox

@igazor sorry for the late reply! Really thank you so much for all the info. I think I shall have to accept defeat and defer to the desktop computer. This will run it no problem, no?

igazor

That's much better. But now you still have the limitations that the Mac version of the game provide. If you can work around that, meaning the game not being able to use more than 2 GB of RAM, then yes it should run. This one is also more of a candidate for bootcamping Windows onto it and playing the Windows version instead (thus lifting the 2 GB limit) if you have the drive space and patience required to support two operating systems.

Tremayne4260

I run Sims 3 just fine on my iMac on the Mac OS side with no problems. I use NRASS Mods to help me with some of the problems, but that is a Sims 3 thing not exclusively Mac. I run Memory Clean 3 while I play which allows me to play for longer and I always run it prior to playing as well as keep it running while I play. Granted I am on a Desktop computer. I read up on a lot before I installed the game and haven't had many problems as I followed the advise of BlueBellFlora, Igazor and others here.