Hey. How many cores and threads can the sims games use? (Specifically Sims 2 and Sims 3.) I am looking at a good multi-core processor (AMD Ryzen 1700) and I want to see if the sims games will benefit too (not just productivity apps). Thanks.

You'll see diminishing returns past two cores. As far as the Sims is concerned, If you only have X amount of dollars to spend you're better off spending it on clock speed/IPC than on more cores.

Four cores is worth it, more than that, not so much.

afaik TS2 will still only use one core, so the advantage you get with multiple cores for TS2 is being able to offload everything else onto other cores so TS2 gets a whole core to itself. Clock speed is definitely more of an advantage than number of cores for sims, anyway.

Sims 2 = 1 core
Sims 3 = mainly 2 core but 3 core give ~14% more fps than 2 core. 4 core actually slightly lower fps probably due to overhead. Hyperthreading really help with 1 core but no benefit on 2 or 4 core.
Sims 4 = perfectly optimized for 4 core. 2 core without HT is very stuttering. 2 core with HT is a lot better. But 4 core give the most smoothness.

About Sims 4, I've noticed it lagging when I have multiple sims in a small house. The game itself doesn't look like its optimized for anything past one core as per the graphs in task manager, which is really sad for my Ryzen 7 1700. OC to 3.8 Ghz makes the game run no better than my old Haswell i3-4170 @ 3.7 Ghz (of course with the same GPU, GTX 1060 6GB). HWMonitor only shows one core pulling 3 to 4 watts with the other cores drawing less than 1 watt. Unless there is a multithreading option that I missed, I think my PC should be able to handle the game quite fine on ultra which many times it doesn't.



So clock speeds are more advantageous for the Sims 4 considering other cores are practically non-existant for the game. I must say this is a really poor decision from EA to not focus on multithreading.

I think they didn't focus on multithreading because most of their customers, and target market, aren't running PCs with more than 2 cores. At most they run 4 cores.

I don't think that's true any more. Most entry-level CPUs nowadays are dual core, some are even quad though that's less common. Single core CPUs are dying out. It is possible that EA just didn't foresee that market change when they were designing the TS4 engine, and by the time it became clear that multithreading was going to be an issue it was too late in the development process to go back and improve support.

I have no problems running TS2 on my dual/quad core systems.

You do yourself no advantage of running TS2 with multiple cores, in fact without using a switch to lock it into a single core, the game will run worse.

As for TS4 with all packs installed, I wouldn't go less than a quad core, Windows 7 or 10 64bit, 8gig RAM is plenty, just get a decent graphics card, but too powerful that it will bottleneck your CPU, which in turn causes a lot of lag.

I'm running quad core right now. No problems. Actually 2 physical cores, 4 logical. All cores running full time, and in "turbo" mode. Still no problems. The only adaption I've made, is with the nVidia performance program, and use CFF explorer to force the game to use more than two gb/ram. No bloatware, and only AVAST! in startup. I disagree about the advantage thing. I ran Sims 2 on a Toshiba Tecra Ivy Bridge i5 processor (TRUE quad core), and HD4000 graphics, and with a little tweaking, runs smooth as glass.
Indeed, it runs smoothly on my current computer.
It might help those using CD/DVD versions of TS2 (I do not use a CD/DVD version), to run the game on a virtual DVD drive. This helps with lag, load time, and quality of play.

Had a problem of TS2 crashing constantly on modern machines, until I noticed in task manager crashes occured after the ram usage started to go above 1.5GIG of RAM, so yeah the more than 2gig switch in CFF Explorer was a life saver.

Good rule for TS4, if your game runs constantly at 50% everything is good, you can even upgrade your graphics card for more improvement,but when it starts hovering constantly at the 80-90% mark, then it's time to upgrade the CPU.

Pentium G4560 = best bang for buck for Sims 3 and 4. Featuring 2 cores 4 threads with 7th generation Kaby Lake architecture aka rebranded of 6th generation Skylake and 3.5Ghz clock speed at $65. It is basically an i3 but name if you don't use very specific stuff like AVX or FMA3 instruction set.

Performance is better than 4th generation (Haswell) Core i3 and on par with 2th generation (Sandy Bridge) Core i5.

I just try this baby with GTX 980 Ti and it run Sims 4 max setting at 1440p flawlessly. Sims 3 is also run OK (nothing can run Sims 3 smoothly at least not with my old i7-3770K @ 5.2Ghz , i7-4770K @ 4.5Ghz or i5-6500 @ 5Ghz).

The only downside is lack of upgrade path since you will need 100 or 200 series chipset motherboard to install G4560 and that is already EOL because Intel just launching 300 series motherboard that is not backward compatible. Best you can do in the future is to grab a used i7-7700K.

So here is the ultimate budget rig for Sims 3 and 4.
G4560
cheap H110 mobo
2x4GB DDR4-2400
GT 1030 or RX 550 (whatever is cheaper) these two cards offer GTX 750 ti like performance which is more than enough for Sims.

Why TS3 would be slower with 4 cores? Btw someone have tried running TS3 with 8 core? I'm planning to buy AMD fx 8350. I like to play with Nraas SP and all EP SP a little bit of mods (not CC).