How much more hardware intensive is The Sims 3 than 2?

[SonicIce]

I have athlon 64 3200 @ 2.5, 1gb ram, and 6800 gt. Sims 2 runs pretty nicely on mostly high settings. Is the sims 3 much more intensive? Will it be sluggish? I meet the minimum req's but you know how conservative those are.

 

[boran]

The Sims3 is rather more resource intensive than the Sims 2, I'm afraid your ram will be the weakest link (altho a single core and older GFX card isnt too great either). You meet the minimum specs to, unless you have Vista.

http://www.thesims3.com/game/systemreq

I think it will run with most stuff turned down.

 

[WildW]

My GF and I could never get Sims 2 running well, even on fairly modern dual-core machines (although she does seem to insist on using Sims 2 to build skyscrapers) - in contrast our experience of Sims 3 was that it ran better than Sims 2 on the same PC.

I've tried running Sims 3 on a single core 3200 (stock) with 8600GT and 1.5GB ram, and it wasn't much fun. It really does want a dual core CPU. Ram makes a major difference too. . . 1.5 was not really enough. It's okay if you're in one place, but the way Sims 3 seamlessly moves between locations really stuggles without fast everything.