Release now, fix later - Cities Skylines 2 Barely playable on mortal PCs

[Arika]

Summary

Cities Skylines 1 had a..less that optimal launch but quickly became the city builder of choice for many people after the abysmal Sim City 2013. But it seems like CS2 is on track to be even worse. it has already been confirmed that it will not be releasing with mod support, something that kept the first game interesting for so long, but now pre-release testing has reportedly shown the game to run at 7-12fps on an i9 13900KS with a 7900XTX at 4k high settings and a 4090 not even able to hit 80fps at 1080p low settings on the old recommended 5600x as the system requirements were suddenly changed at the end of september. Keeping in mind the game is launching in a few days.

 

Quotes

Quote

 Cities Skylines 2 will release in a few days and from the looks of it, it will be one of the worst-optimized PC games of 2023. According to some early benchmarks, this new city builder runs with 7-12fps on an Intel Core i9 13900KS with an AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX at 4K/High Settings.

 

PCGamesHardware got access to the game and shared some early benchmarks. And, as we can see, the game performs horribly on AMD’s most powerful GPU.

 

At 4K/High Settings, the game can drop to 7fps and usually averages at 12fps. Even with AMD FSR 1.0 at 50% resolution scale, the game cannot come close to 30fps. Let me repeat that. With AMD FSR 1.0 at 50%, so basically with an internal resolution at 1080p, Cities Skylines 2 runs at 25fps on the AMD RX 7900XTX. Ouch.

Quote

It’s also worth noting that Colossal Order warned everyone about these PC performance issues. In a shocking statement, the team stated that while it has not achieved the benchmark it was targeting, it will go ahead and release the game. And, to be honest, I really feel sorry about the developers. This decision was made by the management and not by the ones working on it.

 

1080p results

Spoiler

 

1440p results:

Spoiler

 

My thoughts

Unfortunately they know about this, but their management don't care and are making them ship it regardless, the epitome of "release now fix later", but given how badly CS1 still runs, don't hold out too much hope for amazing optimizations to come out any time soon

 

another video from City Planer Plays took figures on fps at different population levels at 4k with a 7950x3d and 4090

 

Population 1K: 52fps
Population 10K: 34fps
Population 25K: 28fps
Population 50K: 27fps
Population 75K: 25fps
Population 100K: 24fps

 

the full data can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JIUokAXWOvHYsVZzJv7Skju5oKgm0-r4/edit#gid=1737240722

So if you're thinking of picking up this game, dont expect to play it on anything other than low-medium if you want anything other than a slideshow if you're running anything higher than 1080p

 

Sources

source of text

https://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/cities-skylines-2-reportedly-runs-with-7-12fps-on-an-intel-core-i9-13900ks-with-amd-radeon-rx-7900xtx-at-4k-high-settings/

 

source of images and original testing

https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Cities-Skylines-2-Spiel-74219/Tests/Release-Benchmarks-Performance-Tuning-Tipps-1431613/2/

[jaslion]

I had seen this issue in pre release builds in those short 30m videos already where mid vid the game started to look worse and the framerate dipped too.

 

Until it got so bad in some games that I wasn't sure if my youtube was lagging or the game was just running badly.

 

I doubt this is ever going to be fixed considering the state cities skylines 1 is still in.

 

 

[SorryBella]

7 minutes ago, Arika said:

Unfortunately they know about this, but their management don't care and are making them ship it regardless

Its Paradox. What do you expect?

 

They go with EA nightmare model but for genres that are so deathly niche that you cant go anywhere else.

[Tedster]

Ouch.

I've been enjoying the original game for the past week or so, for it runs decently on my laptop.

I was looking forward to the sequel, but don't think I can justify the price if it'll only run decently on my desktop.

44 minutes ago, SorryBella said:

Its Paradox. What do you expect?

 

They go with EA nightmare model but for genres that are so deathly niche that you cant go anywhere else.

I didn't know about Paradox's operational practices.

So, Colossal Order is the developer and a surprisingly small studio (30 people as of 2022, as Wikipedia has it);  Paradox pushed this small studio for an unrealistic launch date for a very complex game?

[Needfuldoer]

It's perfectly optimized for your next gaming PC!

[Tedster]

2 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

It's perfectly optimized for your next gaming PC!

If it's mostly CPU-bound (which would make sense), would running the game's backend on a cloud instance somewhere not too distant perhaps be worthwhile for gamers with lesser machines?

I remember this-ish being one of the failed marketing points of the Xbox One a decade ago.

[tikker]

I'm a little confused. Given that it's a sim game, I would (naievely) assume it would be more CPU heavy than GPU heavy, so is this actually a graphics issue or a CPU issue with how the game runs? Given the abysmal performance at even 1080p (equivalent) I would assume the latter?

 

Ah nvm, I misread the article completely and "very low"seems to reach decent frames. Not a great start for the game.

[RejZoR]

1 minute ago, Tedster said:

If it's mostly CPU-bound (which would make sense), would running the game's backend on a cloud instance somewhere not too distant perhaps make sense?

I remember this-ish being one of the failed marketing points of the Xbox One a decade ago.

Yeah, but if local system is crippled so much with simulation, imagine what kind of compute clusters they'd have to be running "in the cloud" to power the play of hundreds of thousands of players?

[leadeater]

43 minutes ago, Tedster said:

So, Colossal Order is the developer and a surprisingly small studio (30 people as of 2022, as Wikipedia has it);  Paradox pushed this small studio for an unrealistic launch date for a very complex game?

CO have made a lot of great games and as far as I'm concerned Paradox is usually a good publisher too.

 

Battletech (amazing), Steel Division (great), Age of Wonders Planet Fall (good, technically great, just not my fav AOW), Age of Wonders III (great), Stellaris (great), Cities Skylines (great, need traffic mods lol).

[JoshB2084]

1 hour ago, Arika said:

So if you're thinking of picking up this game, dont expect to play it on anything other than low-medium if you want anything other than a slideshow if you're running anything higher than 1080p

Me: [stare at my Ryzen 5 5600, RX 5500 XT 8GB, 32GB RAM] Nah...

[Tedster]

22 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Yeah, but if local system is crippled so much with simulation, imagine what kind of compute clusters they'd have to be running "in the cloud" to power the play of hundreds of thousands of players?

My mind wants to adventure a few places, but going there purely in speculation.

I have a feeling (unsubstantiated) that large quantities of cache will benefit Cities: Skylines 2 massively. For the original game, there's a claim of 40-50% improvement.

The 3D V-Cache EPYC CPUs and the recent Xeons with HBM on-package could massively increase performance, especially if the engine were tweaked for it

 

If they were able to run multiple game instances in the same instance of the engine, this might improve efficiency -- always have every needed segment of code in cache, perhaps even all of the frequently-accessed data for each game. They could also have in RAM the information required about each available base map, just acting upon each game's deviation from it.

Consider also that the remote machine isn't capable of rendering, thus doesn't care whatsoever about that pipeline: draw calls, textures, shaders...which I feel is probably about half of the battle in CPU usage for such a game, with so much going on on-screen when not zoomed in.

 

...But yes, it'd still cost a lot.

21 minutes ago, leadeater said:

CO have made a lot of great games and as far as I'm concerned Paradox is usually a good publisher too.

 

Battletech (amazing), Steel Division (great), Ages of Wonders Planet Fall (good, technically great, just not my fav AOW), Age of Wonders III (great), Stellaris (great), Cities Skylines (great, need traffic mods lol).

I see. Of those, I've only played Cities: Skylines.

Apart from CS, were those games all launched in a good state?

 

[suicidalfranco]

Then just play CS1 and give this one a year and a 50% discount whilst the beta testers early buyers pay paradox to do their bug catching job

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, Tedster said:

Apart from CS, were those games all launched in a good state?

That's a bit of a memory test but far as I remember yes.

[leadeater]

23 minutes ago, Tedster said:

My mind wants to adventure a few places, but going there purely in speculation.

I have a feeling (unsubstantiated) that large quantities of cache will benefit Cities: Skylines 2 massively. For the original game, there's a claim of 40-50% improvement.

The 3D V-Cache EPYC CPUs and the recent Xeons with HBM on-package could massively increase performance, especially if the engine were tweaked for it

I'm not really sure about this Cloud discussion? Like the games aren't running in Cloud or anything like that, it's all local render and computation on PC and Console so?

 

And if it's about any multiplayer aspects then that has literally nothing to do with the game local CPU performance and demands.

 

But it's strictly single-player so??

[Tedster]

Just now, leadeater said:

I'm not really sure about this Cloud discussion? Like the games aren't running in Cloud or anything like that, it's all local render and computation on PC and Console so?

 

And if it's about any multiplayer aspects then that has literally nothing to do with the game local CPU performance and demands.

 

But it's strictly single-player so??

I was speculating on the idea that, to make the game more accessible to players with lesser hardware, the game's backend processing could potentially be split and handled by machines on cloud instances, as was one of the marketing points for the potential for games on the Xbox One that never really materialized.

 

I did not say anything to imply that the game was, or would be, run in the cloud, and also did not imply the existence or creation of multiplayer Cities: Skylines gameplay.

[leadeater]

21 minutes ago, Tedster said:

I was speculating on the idea that, to make the game more accessible to players with lesser hardware, the game's backend processing could potentially be split and handled by machines on cloud instances, as was one of the marketing points for the potential for games on the Xbox One that never really materialized.

Ah I see, don't worry wasn't just you talking about it, figured I'd ask.

 

Funnily enough Cloud CPU would actually be slower, desktop CPUs clock significantly higher and allow a lot more power per CPU core so all core clocks are much higher as well. Even the highest end EPYCs and Xeons would struggle to deliver performance the same or greater than current or last gen mid range CPU.

 

The game streaming services that have existed a lot of the time just use rack-mounted desktop systems that we all typically buy, rather than multiple instances on a big server CPU. Right now the economics of game streaming is exceedingly poor, it's a good way to light your money on fire heh, and I'm not convinced that's going to change in the next decade either for demanding game titles.

 

Edit:

For example a 12600K is 25%-30% faster than a 7713 in single thread and light multithread workloads and the frequency optimized 8 core 72F3 only reduces that margin to 10%-12%. ~10600K or older/slower is the point where it would start to offer better performance.

[jaslion]

7 hours ago, SorryBella said:

Its Paradox. What do you expect?

 

They go with EA nightmare model but for genres that are so deathly niche that you cant go anywhere else.

Stellaris is a prime example
 

Great game fot the first 50 years after that normal, fast and fastest are the same. A bit further and slowest is the same as fastest :p.

 

[GOTSpectrum]

1 hour ago, jaslion said:

Stellaris is a prime example
 

Great game fot the first 50 years after that normal, fast and fastest are the same. A bit further and slowest is the same as fastest :p.

 

HEY! I love playing games at 17FPS 

[porina]

I'm used to sub-20 fps in CS1 at times due to CPU limitations, but thanks to native G-sync it's fine and responsive. This game doesn't require a high fps, so with a good VRR display, latency should be manageable even at lower fps. Operating outside of VRR range might suck though.

 

As I've been away on the weekend I've only caught up with CPP's testing. I would caution he's an IRL city planner, not a benchmarker, so even if he did manage to get some data on various configurations I'd treat it with some caution on how to really optimise.

 

I've preordered CS2 and presume it'll unlock sometime late on Tuesday on Steam. Will do my own testing then.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, GOTSpectrum said:

HEY! I love playing games at 17FPS 

isnt that what that starfox game on SNES was running at? Perfectly acceptable cinematic experience!  (also any faster and you probably couldn't beat it lol) 

[da na]

That's insane. Cities: Skylines I maxed out on my laptop's Quadro K5000M and it ran just fine at like 30FPS. 

[StDragon]

[SansVarnic]

"Release now, fix later" isn't this the current gaming business model?

I stopped buying games at release because of this years ago. I wait until the major patch is released and buy the game on sale, I get a win/win, a game that runs and reduced price.

[wanderingfool2]

59 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

"Release now, fix later" isn't this the current gaming business model?

I stopped buying games at release because of this years ago. I wait until the major patch is released and buy the game on sale, I get a win/win, a game that runs and reduced price.

iirc there was an NVidia rep who said that a large chunk of games were released without calling some API calls in the correct order etc.  So when they released they were all buggy or didn't work right..then the "driver" fixes came out for the game which effectively rewrote what they did to make it actually call things correctly.

 

It's a really unfortunate state that we have reached where games are pushed out the door so fast.  I miss the days where a game was designed to work on moderate hardware (but had the option of looking spectacular on high powered hardware).  Instead it seems like they are pushing the "limits" without actually making basic level gameplay as good anymore

[williamcll]

Running the game on the Steam Deck should be a minimum requirement