When you have a full page of items for the game to show, the game would slow to a crawl because it was busy generating their textures. Whenever the clothing thumbnail was to be displayed, the game would start generating textures for all of its presets. This meant that it would need to recreate the deleted textures all over again once they were needed to be displayed. Even then, because the game was still 32-bit, it still had a file-size limit it needed to respect (which is why you can't save your game once it exceeds a certain filesize), so it was also constantly deleting textures from its cache file to keep the filesize down. The game was in this constant cycle of writing unneeded textures to files and unloading them from memory reading needed texture files into memory. That wasn't enough memory to hold the gameplay state, the save file, and the textures all at once.

Unfortunately, being 32-bit meant that memory was limited to 2GB (3.7GB when EA patched it to be large address aware). This is why the game doesn't need you to sit through another 10+ minute loading screen every time you return from CAS It already generated the needed textures for all world objects. When you load up your save file, the game reads the color wheel information for every sim, every object, every piece of clothing, and generates multiple texture files for all of them for differing levels of detail. The color wheel was simply too ambitious for its time. The main reason why the color wheel caused performance problems was because the Sims 3 was only 32-bit. I know the experience I’ve just described isn’t everyone’s experience with TS3, but I know this was the experience of a lot of people. So everyone suggesting the colour wheel, there is a reason it isn’t there and wasn’t there at the start, even though it’s frustrating. I have mods and all the expansions which doesn’t help but I feel like I should still be able to play even then, with The Sims 4, sure missing the colour wheel is crap but ultimately I’d take it over having a slow, glitchy CAS.

I love TS3, but even with my good gaming PC, CAS takes so long to load and my game is super glitchy, CAS is the slowest part of the game. It’s absolutely my favourite thing about TS3, being able to just custom select a hair colour is amazing but the colour wheel was hugely responsible for some gameplay issues for many people (same reason there is no open world anymore). I always see comments about the colour wheel, and I get it, but I think people need to stop expecting one at this point.

Sims 4 mods body hair