The Sims 2 runs contrary to the normal gaming upgrade model that usually calls for a bigger video card. With most games, you can get away with upgrading your graphics to squeeze out better performance. But with The Sims 2, you can kick that whole way of thinking to the curb. It would honestly be hard to find another game that depended less on the video card. You can play the game on a GeForce 7800 GTX and a GeForce 6600 GT and you won't notice a difference in performance. The Sims 2 lives and breathes on raw CPU power; of course, copious amounts of RAM never hurt either.

Testing The Sims 2 has proven to be quite difficult. The gaming benchmark rulebook dictates that each individual run needs to be reproducible and provide stable frame rates. If you've played The Sims 2, you know that the sims pretty much have a mind of their own. You can manage one of your sims, but the rest will go along their merry ways, painting, jumping up and down, and making repeated visits to the restroom. They'll even interact with each other and have conversations independent of any action on your part. The built-in automation hits the CPU hard and affects performance considerably. It also makes it impossible to create an entirely reproducible benchmark.

To try to minimize variance, we limited our input to simply moving the camera around in a set pattern across the Cappulet house, a preset house that comes with the game. Other houses and areas of the game could be more taxing, but for the sake of simplicity, we chose a moderately sized house with four sims in it. We went from room to room in a set circular order as we checked up on our little sims, pausing at each spot for a few seconds. For each test, we performed our minute-long circuit three times and took the most consistent results reported by Fraps.

Frame rates don't matter too much in this game since there isn't a whole lot of fast-paced sims action. You really only need 20-30fps to watch your sims, but frame rates plummet once you try to move the camera around. As soon as you stop moving the camera, the game smoothes out. Even with the best hardware, none of our testbeds proved to be entirely hitch or stutter free while moving the camera.

Guide Sections

The Sims 2 pushes certain computer components to their limits, but tweaking some of the settings and an upgrade or two will help you get the game in playable shape. We've divided our guide into four sections: video card, game settings, CPU, and memory. In each section, we try a wide variety of hardware and report performance results with a dose of our own in-game experience mixed in.

Game Settings
With most modern machines you're able to set all the graphics settings to high and enjoy the scenery. However, if you can count the dust rings on the inside of your computer, you might want to tone down some of the quality settings to improve frame rates. We experimented with the different in-game graphical settings to see which options affected performance the most.

Graphics
The Sims 2 has very reasonable hardware requirements, but we wouldn't necessarily want to play the game on a machine with bare minimum specifications. We tested the game with everything from the top-of-the-line GeForce 7800 GTX to the don't-look-at-my-video-card-it's-hideous GeForce 4 MX 440.

CPU
The Sims 2 only asks for a Pentium III 800MHz CPU. We didn't have a test bed that had that slow of a CPU, but we did use our Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and an unlocked Pentium 4 3.4GHz to test. To see how well the game performs across different CPU speeds, we reduced the speed of our Pentium 4 3.4GHz down to 2.8GHz, and then further down to 1.6GHz to see how the CPU affected performance.

Memory
We varied the amount of system RAM (256MB, 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB) on our test bed to see if memory has an affect on frame rates.