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The Sims is the best selling PC game franchise of all time. That is no hyperbole. If you count the myriad mass of expansion packs from the first and second game, The Sims has sold over 100 million units worldwide. To put this in perspective, that's about 3 copies for each person in Canada! 

Since The Sims 3 will undoubtedly be almost as popular as The Sims 2 – or perhaps even more popular – we thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the engine powering this attractive new entry to the series. This time around, The Sims 3 has gained some graphic enhancements, so it takes a bit more juice under the hood to really get things going smoothly, compared to the second or first game in the series.  

Overall, of course, the requirements for this game are relatively low, compared to most other PC games in 2009. But at the same time, many fans of The Sims aren't hardcore PC gamers, so they will be playing the game with more modest equipment. That is why we are going to see how much performance we can squeeze out of the game's engine, without sacrifcing too much eye candy.

This article has two main goals. The first, is to go through the game's visual quality settings, option by option, to see which ones cause the biggest performance hits, and how they look when changed. The second goal is to take this information, and come up with a 'Neo-recommend' setting to use to play The Sims 3, which will find a balance between looks and performance, for those of you that don't have a killer $2000 gaming computer on your desk.

This article is more aimed towards the casual gaming crowd, or hardware neophyte, than it is the more hardcore crowd wanting to know if a HD 4870 X2 gets 50 or 60 frames more than a HD 4850 X2 in the game (if that didn't make sense to you, then that's great, stick around and read the rest of the article!) We wanted to take a look at gaming performance with video cards under the $80 mark.

Is it worth turning off mirror reflections for the extra amount frames? Is a 'medium' setting good for in-game textures? These are the kind of questions this article will endeavor to answer.