BlackGarden over at The Sim Shack posted various pictures of The Sims 3 running at different settings – from low, medium and to high.  Her analysis is based on the recent pics from the Taiwan fanday event (from My Sims World).

Here is her breakdown:

First off, the low quality. Textures are fuzzy, shadows are not well defined. From what I can make out of the text, however, they seem to remark that the gameplay is still quite smooth, and that one can follow their Sims as they ride a bike or drive their car without the game lagging.

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This one is medium quality. I think the graphics card in this may have been an 8500GT, though I may have just misinterpreted the text. You can see the textures are decent quality here, and the water details are not lost.

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Finally, these shots are taken on a high quality computer. This beast probably had an NVidia 8800GT (judging from the article it was one of these: Ati X1900 / Ati HD3850 / Ati HD4870x2 / nVidia 8800GTX / nVidia 8600GT) and a fast dual core or a quad core processor, and at least 2GB of RAM.

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She goes on with more in-depth information, so I’d suggest you swing by The Sim Shack to finish reading!