It also makes it impossible to create an entirely reproducible benchmark. The built-in automation hits the CPU hard and affects performance considerably. They'll even interact with each other and have conversations independent of any action on your part. You can manage one of your sims, but the rest will go along their merry ways, painting, jumping up and down, and making repeated visits to the restroom. If you've played The Sims 2, you know that the sims pretty much have a mind of their own. The gaming benchmark rulebook dictates that each individual run needs to be reproducible and provide stable frame rates.
Testing The Sims 2 has proven to be quite difficult. The Sims 2 lives and breathes on raw CPU power of course, copious amounts of RAM never hurt either. You can play the game on a GeForce 7800 GTX and a GeForce 6600 GT and you won't notice a difference in performance. It would honestly be hard to find another game that depended less on the video card. But with The Sims 2, you can kick that whole way of thinking to the curb.
With most games, you can get away with upgrading your graphics to squeeze out better performance.
The Sims 2 runs contrary to the normal gaming upgrade model that usually calls for a bigger video card.
