I was running Sim City 2000 inside Win 3.1 on an 386 with 33MHz (I had 16MB of ram though). But it was virtually unplayable.
In my youth, people would quit Windows 3.1 to run games in DOS, because the overhead of the OS was too much.
Don’t know if that could be an explanation.
It ran great on a Performa 475 (25 MHz Motorola 68LC040). I guess that settles that old debate!
Sim City 2000 is a very different (and computationally more demanding) game than the original Sim City.