Hey guys,
Upon installing the Sims 3 today, I immediately noticed that textures became increasingly muddy the further away they were from the camera. It looks quite bad. (I don't mean the low-res textures loaded for distant lots, but rather a loss of quality scaling linearly with distance.) This is because the Sims 3 doesn't have an anisotropic filtering option ingame. You can greatly improve overall texture quality by turning on this feature in your graphics card's control panel.
I only have an nVidia card, so I can only provide instructions for nVidia cards. I'm sure Google can explain how to set it for ATI/AMD.
1. Right click on desktop -> nVidia Control Panel
2. Make sure advanced settings are on.
3. On the left panel, choose 3D Settings -> Manage 3D settings.
4. On the right panel, click the program settings tab and select Sims 3.
5. Select your anisotropic filtering level. This setting will be for the Sims 3 only. I recommend 4x for a good balance of visual quality and performance on modest PCs.
Note: Antialiasing is provided in the ingame options as "Edge Smoothing" and need not be enabled here.