Quick update to this ongoing problem. It’s looking like the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 and the NVIDIA GeForce 320M are the problem.
SimGuruHydra has commented on the thread over at TS3 letting us know they are aware of the problem (no comment…….).
In the meantime, if your Mac has one of these cards as the integrated card, and you have two graphics cards in the machine, try switching over to the dedicated card:
System Preferences > Energy Saver
Sorry to keep going on about this but I’m getting a lot of hits about it so hopefully people are aware of the specific problem and it will be resolved shortly.
Bluebellflora 
Thanks for the update! I tried to post on your forum thread but it kept giving me a 404 error, as does the fourth page on the link you posted.
Btw, I added you on the community site (Yingerpoof) because of the 404 error on the forum wouldn’t allow me to post my specs were, though I don’t think it matters anymore, does it?
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I Have On My Macbook A intel GMA X3100 144 Ram Graphics card A little Slower Than A geforce card Getting Late Night for xmas any tips to speed up gameplay
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More system RAM? You can probably go up to 4Gb.
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I’m getting the same error too Brian. Bloody EA!
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Drats, I have the 9400 Video Card! And its the only one I’ve got. I hope we’ll see some patches soon. I’m surprised someone hasn’t tried to sue them in the last couple of days or something since the Tech Specs say it can support Mac OS X 10.5.7 Leopard or higher. It is kind of messed up that EA or The Sims develops wouldn’t take care of this before hand
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Crap isn’t it Natalie. Let’s see if they change the specs on the Town Life box which comes out at the end of this week – should be interesting 😉
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Haha… I fixed mine :)… I happened to have an external HD and a family pack for SL (I’ve only used it for 2 computers) so I partitioned my 1TB EHD and installed OS X Snow Leopard there… One mistake though… I only left 50GB for it
I wish I woulda save more, maybe I’ll reformat and change it to 75, IF I need it :D… But I just glad my gamesworks! (for now xDD)
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Nice! You must be so pleased KS, well done 😀
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I’m VERY pleased :D, but one thing that ticks me off tho. I have to reformat and reinstall OS X on the partition to resize it. I set it for 50GB, installed the OS with 48GB left (I was surprised)… Then after installing TS3 and WA and restoring my saves, it went down to 28GB! :OO!
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Yeah, that is annoying, but your Mac made it very easy for you to do it though 😉
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I’m having the same problem as well but I hope they’ll give us a fix as soon possible and I just got sims 3 town life stuff pack yesterday it causing a lot of problems.
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Ive had this response from EA
Thank you for responding and letting me know the results of the troubleshooting. I noticed that you have an NVIDIA 9400 video card on your computer, and this is one of the video cards that is experiencing an issue with The Sims 3 and the latest update. Our developers are aware of the issue and are working as quickly as possible to find a resolution so that you can return to playing your game. I will be forwarding this information to the studio for them to review while this issue is being investigated and worked on. If you have any further questions about this in the meantime, please let me know. Thanks!
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Same response as everyone else and not a damn thing done about it yet. They probably don’t even know how to turn a Mac on…..
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They’re lazy. A few other games using Cider had the same problem but are now fixed. If I could get the stupid windows installation to work under anything in Mac (wineskin, crossover) this would solve my problem. Theres no room for it on Bootcamp 😦
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THE SIMS 3 NOW WORKS ON MY MAC!!!! NEW UPDATE HAS FIXED THE PROBLEM!!!!!!!!
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I take that back….. Played it all day yesterday. Today bought town life stuff pack and installed it and once again frozen
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There must be something dodgy in Town Life 😦
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Uninstalled everything then reinstalled it all then applied the update and it works again now…. The patch needs to be applied after the games to work. Hope i don’t have to do it all again with Pets
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Not necessarily, I managed to patch after each EP and SP and get it working again. When I patched the base game there were 2 patches, the first took me to 1.22, the second to 1.25, no idea why. Glad you got it working again though 🙂
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