Better graphics are too far into the future ? TS 3 is an old game with old graphics ? Neither of those things are true , that ' s my point . Polycounts on furniture are lower in TS 4 than in both TS 2 and TS 3 . That is a massive downgrade even when you don ' t take into account the fact that both those games are quite old . TS 4 ' s texture sizes are larger nor smaller than in TS 3 . Considering that there ' s 5 years between these two games , that ' s not a downgrade in absolute terms but certainly one in relative terms . Graphics should be getting better , the same is not good enough 5 years down the road . TS 4 does not generate cubemap reflections , but rather uses a generic one for all reflections . TS 3 does generate cubemaps . That ' s a downgrade . Sims do not have toes in TS 4 . In fact , Sims don ' t have any details in TS 4 that they didn ' t have in TS 3 . Over a period of 5 years , that ' s a downgrade . TS 4 ' s sysreqs are barely any higher than TS 3 ' s . If you ' ve ever heard of Moore ' s law , that would not be music to your ears . Despite this , I get a lower framerate in TS 4 than I do in TS 3 . This is true for all 4 systems I ' ve played on . TS 4 has possibly the worst texture compression I ' ve ever had the misfortune of noticing in a video game , because it makes textures that look just fine in another engines look incredibly blurry . And I ' ve checked TS 4 ' s textures look sharper in TS 3 . Long story short , this game has nothing on TS 3 besides better art direction and a couple of fancy lighting effects that you can mod into TS 3 anyway . Art direction , coincidentally , has nothing to do with actual graphics .