I'm receiving conflicting information regarding manually patching TS3W.exe to be large address aware. From my understanding, Electronic Arts released a patch in 2010 to enable ~3.7GB of memory usage as opposed to only ~2GB, so manually patching the executable to be large address aware is no longer necessary for performance as it's already been done. However I'm being informed that this is false and the application still needs manual patching.

After browsing the patch notes published on thesims3.com, none of them mention this runtime change; however it may have been intentionally left out since it's more relevant to developers. I also don't see information about this listed on the "Tips For Better Game Performance" help page which leads me to believe it's no longer necessary and already been done.

Does anyone have any information or resources to confirm either claim?

The patch that made this change on TS3 for Windows was 1.17, the one that was released alongside of the Late Night EP in late 2010. There never was an equivalent patch for TS3 for Mac, so the 32-bit version of the game on the macOS is still restricted to 2 GB.

This was all just around a year before my time with TS3, but I played the now older 32-bit Mac version enough to understand why players were fed up with the RAM restrictions as the EPs kept rolling out, and why wanting to use a third party patch was such a popular idea. But no, on Windows this is totally not necessary.