Getting an eGPU for Sims 3 and CAW

I-Am-Unicorn123

I'm looking into setting up an eGPU for my laptop (running Windows via Bootcamp) in order to play the Sims 3/CAW relatively smoothly/at high settings. Which enclosure and/or graphics card would you recommend getting (hopefully under $300 but that might be very unrealistic!).

igazor

I may be a bit behind on the latest developments here, but I don't know of anyone who has tried let alone met with success on enabling TS3 to run via Bootcamp using an external GPU. The entire procedure is, or at least recently was, considered pretty much experimental even without Bootcamp being in the picture.

If you do not get a more informed answer here, you may wish to cross-post to EA's Answers.HQ board and/or ModTheSims to expand the readership of the question to more who might be familiar with the process and can make some good recommendations.

puzzlezaddict

I haven't heard of anyone playing TS3 with an eGPU yet, although that doesn't mean no one's tried. The closest I've seen was someone who was using one for Sims 4 and a few other games, and who reported that Sims 4 actually had lower framerates when running on the eGPU, as opposed to the significant improvement in other, more demanding games.

Sims 3 isn't Sims 4, but I think the point was that the concept of an external graphics card was nice in theory but had some issues to work out in practice. While we could tell you what cards would theoretically run Sims 3 on ultra settings, there's no guarantee that it would work out that way. So it seems like a lot of money to spend on a possibility that doesn't have much of a track record to support it.