Cities: Skylines - CPU or GPU upgrade?

[Senzelian]

I've finally come to the point, where Cities: Skylines runs at under 20FPS and eats all of my available 32GB of RAM.

So, what to do?

 

I want to upgrade my CPU, aswell as my GPU either by the end of this year, or next year.

My current specs:

• Ryzen 2700
• AsRock X570
• 2x 16GB 3000Mhz
• GTX 1080
• 3440x1440 60Hz

But in case of Cities Skylines, what would be recommended to upgrade first?

I plan to get a RTX 3080 and a Zen3 8-core or 12-core CPU.

[Moonzy]

1 minute ago, Senzelian said:

But in case of Cities Skylines, what would be recommended to upgrade first?

what's being pinned at 100%? upgrade that

 

inb4 "yes"

Spoiler

 

[emosun]

To my knowledge cities skyline itself has core issues that prevent it from actually making use of multiple cores very efficiently. Which is why it runs like crap on every computer ever.

Only real way to make it faster is to unmod it. (i'm willing to bet anything with all 32gb of ram being used you modded the hell out of it and expected to to somehow still work correctly). remove populations mods and run less people and low textures in the city

[SupaKomputa]

Using higher core number in CS will not perform any better than what you have now. Faster core maybe.

The most immediate solution for you is to upgrade the ram to 64gb.

Or 32gb + a fast nvme ( so the spillout would not be horrible).

It also helps to have more vram.

 

6 minutes ago, emosun said:

 remove populations mods and run less people and low textures in the city

You'll also removed the fun of it. 

[emosun]

1 minute ago, SupaKomputa said:

You'll also removed the fun of it. 

yeah when I'm building a city the only fun i get out of it is looking at the textures , otherwise it's only hell /s

[manikyath]

25 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

and eats all of my available 32GB of RAM.

fix your windows or game install before you spend money, this is actually impossible.

also, shitty:skylines just runs like crap in general. upgrading to zen3 will maybe get you from 20 to 35fps in a similar scenario, but that's still equally horrible.

 

13 minutes ago, emosun said:

To my knowledge cities skyline itself has core issues that prevent it from actually making use of multiple cores very efficiently. Which is why it runs like crap on every computer ever.

it 'uses' 4 threads, how efficiently it uses them... is a whole different topic

[emosun]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

it 'uses' 4 threads, how efficiently it uses them... is a whole different topic

well then great news for anyone still using a q6600 then lol

[Senzelian]

36 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

what's being pinned at 100%? upgrade that

Yay, no upgrade needed!

 

25 minutes ago, emosun said:

To my knowledge cities skyline itself has core issues that prevent it from actually making use of multiple cores very efficiently. Which is why it runs like crap on every computer ever.

Only real way to make it faster is to unmod it. (i'm willing to bet anything with all 32gb of ram being used you modded the hell out of it and expected to to somehow still work correctly). remove populations mods and run less people and low textures in the city

Yup I modded the hell out of it.
I thought I could just throw more money at it and it'd be fine. :s

 

16 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Using higher core number in CS will not perform any better than what you have now. Faster core maybe.

The most immediate solution for you is to upgrade the ram to 64gb.

Or 32gb + a fast nvme ( so the spillout would not be horrible).

It also helps to have more vram.

Yeah I thought about upgrading the RAM, but spending at least 150€ just for Cities seems a little over the top.
The other upgrades I can justify because of Cyberpunk and other games.

 

5 minutes ago, manikyath said:

fix your windows or game install before you spend money, this is actually impossible.

also, shitty:skylines just runs like crap in general. upgrading to zen3 will maybe get you from 20 to 35fps in a similar scenario, but that's still equally horrible.

 

it 'uses' 4 threads, how efficiently it uses them... is a whole different topic

I reinstall Windows about every year. This install is only half a year old.

Edit: You know what I mean with "all of my available RAM" - the rest of it, whatever is left. ~20GB

I'm spending the money either way. The question is just whether I should go GPU or CPU first and if one of them would make my Cities Skylines experience noticeably better.

[Moonzy]

1 minute ago, Senzelian said:

Yay, no upgrade needed!

have to see individual thread usage

but suffice to say, you wont get much out of a CPU upgrade, since 2700's single thread performance isnt that much worse than the best ones today (not 20 fps to 60 fps better)

 

you're "using" all 8GB VRAM, so that might be your issue?

[emosun]

3 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

Yup I modded the hell out of it.
I thought I could just throw more money at it and it'd be fine. :s

Alright then you could throw 300k at this problem and not have it solved. No amount of hardware solves bad programming and bad user decisions

If I ran Pong at a resolution of a million X million , then that would be MY fault for it's poor performance and nothing to do with budget or technology

[manikyath]

6 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

I'm spending the money either way. The question is just whether I should go GPU or CPU first and if one of them would make my Cities Skylines experience noticeably better.

if your primary goal for uprgading is making shitty:skylines slightly less poor - cpu is the way to go, look for single core (or more accurately - quad core) performance, rather than total core count.

[manikyath]

9 minutes ago, emosun said:

well then great news for anyone still using a q6600 then lol

cities:skylines, powerpoint edition.

[Senzelian]

7 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

have to see individual thread usage

but suffice to say, you wont get much out of a CPU upgrade, since 2700's single thread performance isnt that much worse than the best ones today (not 20 fps to 60 fps better)

 

you're "using" all 8GB VRAM, so that might be your issue?

I thought about that aswell. But I assume that the game is just allocating that VRAM in case it needs it.
I also see no difference in day-time and night-time performance. You'd think that the difference in the amount of shadows would impact performance.

 

5 minutes ago, emosun said:

Alright then you could throw 300k at this problem and not have it solved. No amount of hardware solves bad programming and bad user decisions

If I ran Pong at a resolution of a million X million , then that would be MY fault for it's poor performance and nothing to do with budget or technology

Don't take it so seriously.

I know that the mods destroy the performance. I'm not an idiot. 

I'm not asking to get 60FPS out of C:S, but instead improve the performance just enough, to not be looking at a slide show.
If it doesn't work, fine. It was worth a shot. 

 

4 minutes ago, manikyath said:

if your primary goal for uprgading is making shitty:skylines slightly less poor - cpu is the way to go, look for single core (or more accurately - quad core) performance, rather than total core count.

Thanks!
That answers my question. If this is correct I will upgrade the CPU first and actuall go for an 8-core and not a 12-core CPU and upgrade the GPu a month later. (If Nvidia gets their sh*t together)

[Moonzy]

14 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

I thought about that aswell. But I assume that the game is just allocating that VRAM in case it needs it.
I also see no difference in day-time and night-time performance. You'd think that the difference in the amount of shadows would impact performance.

yea but like, it's also potentially allocating assets to system RAM, thus the low FPS(?)

 

i could see a few possible solutions:

1) faster single core perf, it helps with many games, especially if one of your core is constantly above 90%

2) more VRAM, your gpu usage looks fine, but the VRAM is "capped"

3) quad channel CPU, because the game uses so many system RAM, the ram bandwidth might be an issue? as well as lower memory latency could help.

 

edit: none of these solutions would beat out just reducing the amount of mods, that's my opinion

[Senzelian]

11 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

yea but like, it's also potentially allocating assets to system RAM, thus the low FPS(?)

 

i could see a few possible solutions:

1) faster single core perf, it helps with many games, especially if one of your core is constantly above 90%

2) more VRAM, your gpu usage looks fine, but the VRAM is "capped"

3) quad channel CPU, because the game uses so many system RAM, the ram bandwidth might be an issue? as well as lower memory latency could help.

I looked at the individual cores now as was previously suggested and I guess you're right with your first assumption.
CPU11 sits around 70-90%, while the others are basically sleeping.

That would also explain why I saw improvements with HT/SMT turned off in a few benchmarks.

 

 

I tested the VRAM theory by disabling shadows and AA. No improvement.

I really don't think that's the issue. There is also not a whole lot I can do about that anyway. The RTX3080 only has 10GB and whether the upcoming AMD Navi cards will have more VRAM or will be of any use at all, is a completly different story.

So I guess I'm stuck with what I have right now either way.

 

The RAM bandwith thing is interesting, but only because of Ryzen. Maybe it would help to upgrade to faster RAM.

Quad channel is out of my budget. I'm not going threadripper  

[Moonzy]

3 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

I looked at the individual cores now as was previously suggested and I guess you're right with your first assumption.
CPU11 sits around 70-90%, while the others are basically sleeping.

That would also explain why I saw improvements with HT/SMT turned off in a few benchmarks.

 

you're probably also pagefiling, judging by the RAM usage at 30gb while you "only" have 32gb total system memory

there's just,,, so many things going on

[Senzelian]

28 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

you're probably also pagefiling, judging by the RAM usage at 30gb while you "only" have 32gb total system memory

there's just,,, so many things going on

Yup I know that I'm making good use of that pagefile  

I'm only half way through the loading screen once the RAM is full. I bet if I had 64GB of RAM I'd be looking at 40-45GB of RAM usage.

[Moonzy]

1 minute ago, Senzelian said:

Yup I know that I'm making good use of that pagefile  

I'm only half way through the loading screen once the RAM is full. I bet if I had 64GB of RAM I'd be looking at 40-45GB of RAM usage.

yeaaaa idk how to comment on that

this is a weird case where you'll probably have to explore it, see what works for you

[emosun]

1 hour ago, Senzelian said:

I tested the VRAM theory by disabling shadows and AA. No improvement.

neither of which use vram

[Senzelian]

9 hours ago, emosun said:

neither of which use vram

Depends on the method of AA. Shadows can increase the effect.

[emosun]

6 hours ago, Senzelian said:

Depends on the method of AA. Shadows can increase the effect.

Yeah but your main source of vram usage is geometry/polygons and textures

[Senzelian]

6 hours ago, emosun said:

Yeah but your main source of vram usage is geometry/polygons and textures

I've seen high usage due to AA. I doubt that thats the case in C:S tho.

Here I just wanted to see if anything changes at all. If I actually ran into a VRAM limit and I free up even the slightest bit of ressources, then I should see an improvement, but I didn't. That leads me to believe that I'm not running into a VRAM limit. That's all.