Sim Aquarium

For some people, there is nothing more relaxing than looking at fish and how they swim around, which is why aquarium screensavers are so popular. If you are looking for something to relax yourself during your breaks, then you should look at Sim Aquarium, which is much more than just another aquarium screensaver. It simulates a real-life aquarium on your screen and it places numerous customization controls at your disposal, to enhance that simulation. You can add or remove various fish species, choose different backgrounds and make numerous visual adjustments.

Installing Sim Aquarium is quite easy and it takes only a few moments to complete the process. It works on Windows XP and all later editions and it is also available for Android and iOS mobile platforms. The application itself is free, but you have to pay if you wish to unlock new fish species or backgrounds.

You can set Sim Aquarium as your default screensaver and wait until it launches automatically, but you can also run it manually, through its executable. The screensaver consists of a 3D underwater scene, with highly detailed fish, which behave realistically. The best part is that the screensaver is fully interactive. The fish react to the mouse cursor when you move it and you can also feed them by clicking the mouse wheel. Feeding them is not mandatory, so you won't find them floating belly up.

Clicking anywhere in the 3D environment will reveal a wide range of customization options. Fish species are displayed on the left side of the screen and you can add and remove one or more exemplars from each species. You can also choose from a wide variety of underwater environments, like corals or algae, on the right side of the screen. A feature that is definitely worth mentioning is the possibility of turning the aquarium into a live desktop wallpaper. In other words, you can work with icons and windows and enjoy the animated fish at the same time.

You can also bring up a tabbed settings menu, which presents a wide range of visual and sound adjustment controls. Sim Aquarium allows you to change the water level, enable, disable and adjust sun rays, increase or decrease the swimming speed of the fish, change the number of bubbles and more. A series of performance options are available as well. It is possible to enable or disable V-Sync, limit the FPS to a certain value and disable other visual features, which may affect performance on low-end machines. Furthermore, you can choose one of three predefined profiles, for best visual effects, best performance or for balanced settings.