User blog:Lost Labyrinth/Tips on improving the visual quality of TS3 with minimal performance impact

Yes I know. TS3 is a major resource hog on its own, that's why you have to turn down some settings to make it playable. Well fortunately there are some third party graphics mods that can be used by most games, including TS3, to improve the visual quality. These are quite beneficial to those with lower end PCs, including those with integrated graphics cards, or those who want to push the visual performance of TS3 a bit further.

USE ANY OF THE LISTED SOFTWARE AT YOUR OWN RISK

FXAA Tool

The FXAA Tool allows you to add anti-aliasing (smooth edges) and other visual enhancements such as Bloom, post-Shading (gives stuff like carpets a more realistic look), HDR etc.

To install, just download the .zip file, extract it, run the .exe, add a profile for the game and point it to *INSTALL DIRECTORY*/The Sims 3/Game/Bin and play around with it until you get a look and feel that's good for you.

Note that due to an error with d3d9.dll, you'll have to run TS3W.exe as an Administrator.

injectSMAA

injectSMAA is a tool used to add anti-aliasing with a minimal hit on performance, like with FXAA, but better visual quality than FXAA. Note that this can't be used with the FXAA Tool.

Just download the .zip and copy the contents of the d3d9 folder to *INSTALL DIRECTORY*/The Sims 3/Game/Bin and then edit injector.ini with Notepad changing the SMAA preset to whatever you wish. Using Ultra gives a comparable performance to 8xMSAA (High smooth edges on TS3) with less of a performance hit. I should note I did lose a few frames by enabling Ultra so stick with High or lower if need be. High seems to look good on Sims but can be hit or miss with objects, so that's probably 4-6xMSAA in comparison. I personally can't decide whether to stick with Ultra or go to High.

It's worth noting that using this does cause some text distortion on the TS3 interface but improves the look of the 3D graphics. The text is readable in most cases for me so if your vision is not too great or if you have a major need to read then use at your own risk.

Note that due to an error with d3d9.dll, you'll have to run TS3W.exe as an Administrator.

ENBseries

Note that I tried to implement ENBseries into TS3 using both the generic preset and the Skyrim preset and I was met with a crash to desktop. If somebody is able to get it working properly with TS3 then you're more than welcome to share it. For whatever it's worth, I managed to get the GTA3 preset working with Crazy Taxi (yeah weird combination) to some success. GTA3's version is pretty barebones but the point is it could be a TS3-specific issue.

ENB basically directly manipulates the shader queue to add effects such as HDR, bloom, SSAO, depth of field, volumetric lighting and more. TS3 could benefit from stuff like this but it's picky...so yeah.

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I'll add more of these if I find them and if anybody has any tricks they have, feel free to comment and such.

Enjoy! Lost Labyrinth • (c) • (b) 21:09, March 23, 2013 (UTC)