Seasons or free time I'm ready for my next expansion pack, and have it narrowed down to Seasons and Free Time. Currently I have Nightlife and Bon Voyage. I'm looking for the pack that adds the most to the core game, and will refresh game play the most. Because of that I'm leaning towards Free Time, but some elements of Seasons are very appealing. Thanks in advance for any help.
Well it will depend especially if you're playing with an integrated graphics chip or a true video card. If you have an integrated chipset than go with Freetime as it's not as stressful on a chipset but if you have a video card then go with Seasons. Bon Voyage and Seasons are the two most heavily worked expansion packs out there. Combining the two on a chipset will cause a lot more lag because of all the shaders these two utilize than you're use to with just Nightlife and Bon Voyage. Do you know by chance what you have in your system? You can find out by pressing the start button and look for the "run" option in your start menu. Type in Dxdiag and let it gather it's info. Press the display tab and see what it says. You can also press the "save all information" and save it to your desktop as a txt file and copy and paste the display info in your next post if you're not certain about it.
I have a NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 Graphics card with 64 MB of memory. Not exactly cutting edge technology (by a long shot), but it does the job, at least so far. With the packs I already have, there are no lag problems, but I can see adding too much would start to bog things down. My computer is a Dell with a Pentium 4 2.66 processor and I'm running windows XP with no plans of upgrading to vista lol. My system memory is maxed out at 1 GB also. Again, it's old technology and I know I'm pushing things a bit, but it runs quite well. With all that said, I bought Seasons on the way home from work and have it installed, and played for about an hour. Everything works great so far, but it hasn't snowed yet, which is where I've read the lag problems are the worst. I have been struck by lightning though, which was actually pretty funny. Thanks for the reply. I'll let you know how things go with the snow.
So long as you keep some of your graphics settings down at a lower setting you should be ok. But if you decide to play any large lots with lots of stuff on them you may run into problems. But small lots should be ok.
