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

[WereCat]

7 hours ago, porina said:

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.

Well. Good luck, hope it will perform better than this

 

 

I'n the German article they also note random 0.5s long stutters that occur regardless of settings and city size

[Poinkachu]

18 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

It's perfectly optimized for your next gaming PC!

"For some peoples with very thick wallets that is"

FTFY

 

[porina]

3 hours 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.

For this particular game, assuming it isn't that dissimilar from its predecessor, fps isn't that important. Yes, it is great to have smooth interactions. As I mentioned earlier, the frame rate in CS1 can drop below 20fps at certain zoom levels, but the UI remains responsive and it is fine. This isn't your typical action game where performance is much more important to the experience.

 

In this case they have recognised problems, rather than pretend all is fine. Console launch has been pushed out to next year, much to the pain of those hoping to play at launch. Still it seems "good enough" on PC to launch. 

 

1 hour ago, williamcll said:

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

A big "hell no" from me on that. In general, that is. We already have Switch holding back cross platform gaming, don't let the Steam Deck be another anchor. If games devs can and want to optimise for it, no objection, but certainly should not be mandatory.

 

1 hour ago, WereCat said:

I'n the German article they also note random 0.5s long stutters that occur regardless of settings and city size

In CS1 I get the occasional stutter when the game is presumably loading assets that aren't regularly used, like city achievement screens, and when auto-save kicks in. I have long wondered if my system is showing its age a bit in that compared to modern systems, I'm down quite a bit in low-thread performance which may help with this somewhat, although the ultimate responsibility remains on the game to be sufficiently polished in the first place.

 

There does seem to be a general push towards making some things non-blocking where they currently are, but it does take more work and understanding to get right.

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, porina said:

For this particular game, assuming it isn't that dissimilar from its predecessor, fps isn't that important. Yes, it is great to have smooth interactions. As I mentioned earlier, the frame rate in CS1 can drop below 20fps at certain zoom levels, but the UI remains responsive and it is fine. This isn't your typical action game where performance is much more important to the experience.

 

In this case they have recognised problems, rather than pretend all is fine. Console launch has been pushed out to next year, much to the pain of those hoping to play at launch. Still it seems "good enough" on PC to launch. 

Also it's a game that will be around for a very long time with many updates and expansion, mods etc. Either a way to make it run better on current hardware will come or just better hardware will come out and slowly the problem will go away.

 

Huge CS1 maps are crushing as you point out, it's the downfall of literally every city building game ever, the longer you play and the bigger your city gets the slower the game gets to the point it can become unplayable even.

 

P.S. 80% of the time city builders play themselves, "performance" doesn't matter 

[WereCat]

10 minutes ago, porina said:

For this particular game, assuming it isn't that dissimilar from its predecessor, fps isn't that important. Yes, it is great to have smooth interactions. As I mentioned earlier, the frame rate in CS1 can drop below 20fps at certain zoom levels, but the UI remains responsive and it is fine. This isn't your typical action game where performance is much more important to the experience.

 

In this case they have recognised problems, rather than pretend all is fine. Console launch has been pushed out to next year, much to the pain of those hoping to play at launch. Still it seems "good enough" on PC to launch. 

 

A big "hell no" from me on that. In general, that is. We already have Switch holding back cross platform gaming, don't let the Steam Deck be another anchor. If games devs can and want to optimise for it, no objection, but certainly should not be mandatory.

 

In CS1 I get the occasional stutter when the game is presumably loading assets that aren't regularly used, like city achievement screens, and when auto-save kicks in. I have long wondered if my system is showing its age a bit in that compared to modern systems, I'm down quite a bit in low-thread performance which may help with this somewhat, although the ultimate responsibility remains on the game to be sufficiently polished in the first place.

 

At what point you go from "playing at 20FPS is fine" to "steam deck hw being minimum requirements is holding gaming back"? 

 

 

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, WereCat said:

At what point you go from "playing at 20FPS is fine" to "steam deck hw being minimum requirements is holding gaming back"? 

If a 140W+ current gen desktop CPU is only able to do 20FPS then a ~15W mobile part is going to be worse right? Ergo CS2 couldn't exist as it is if it MUST run on the SteamDeck.

[porina]

5 minutes ago, WereCat said:

At what point you go from "playing at 20FPS is fine" to "steam deck hw being minimum requirements is holding gaming back"? 

In CS1 specifically 20fps can be fine with a VRR display, but in general gaming I'd prefer >=60fps average. At some point we have to raise the minimum level in order to have better experiences. When resources are limited, devs have to limit what they do to make it work, and you can't easily scale up from that. Generating a few more random NPCs in the background doesn't cut it.

 

While most commenters focus on how a game looks, I do feel the world building has gotten more complicated in recent years, and that does require raising the minimum bar. Not every game needs this, so I'm fine if game devs want to target the Steam Deck. For the more genuinely demanding games a higher bar can be appropriate. It can be hard to tell the difference between badly optimised and actually demanding, but it feels like we're at a time where comparisons to games from say 5 years ago aren't really applicable any more. We have great looking games in the past but do they match up with current levels of world complexity?

[WereCat]

Just now, leadeater said:

If a 140W+ current gen desktop CPU is only able to do 20FPS then a ~15W mobile part is going to be worse right? Ergo CS2 couldn't exist as it is if it MUST run on the SteamDeck.

That's not what I'm saying though. 

 

I just find it funny that on one side he/she does not mind playing at objectively bad framerate (yes, I understand the argument of "it does not matter for this game" and I still disagree) and on the other hand Steam Deck HW has low performance so it shouldn't hold back games that run like crap even on high end HW. 

At least that's how I've seen the comment when I've read it. 

 

 

I agree with @porina@porina  that games should not be forced to run at low end HW if its not feasible. Yes, Steam Deck CPU is not that great performance wise and people should not expect to play new demanding games on it.

 

But when you have a high end HW or even mid range HW which you paid $1500+ for I think it's reasonable to be upset about having to play a game where you can't maintain even 30 FPS stable. 

 

RTX 4090 not being to even avg 30FPS at 1440p High is just ridiculous. 

 

Now I'll give the benefit of the doubt to the devs that maybe on High presets there are some settings that just tank CPU perf like crowd density, etc... But if its just graphical tweaks for the most part then from the graphs the game is CPU bound somewhere around 70FPS with 5600X. 

 

(obviously depends on how the game was tested). 

 

But considering that devs themselves are agreeing the game runs bad then I just see no reason to be defending the bad performance in the first place. 

 

Also I disagree with the argument that some issues were present in the 1st game too... Why does that even matter? Shouldn't you want these issues fixed? 

 

I'm going based on the article from

 

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

 

So it's possible that some of the performance issues have been resolved by todays or tomorrows release. 

 

Once the actual release day benches are out I'll assess my opinion on the matter. 

 

 

[porina]

15 minutes ago, WereCat said:

That's not what I'm saying though. 

I may be mixing things up here since I'm talking in part about CS1, CS2 and gaming in general.

 

15 minutes ago, WereCat said:

But when you have a high end HW or even mid range HW which you paid $1500+ for I think it's reasonable to be upset about having to play a game where you can't maintain even 30 FPS stable. 

 

RTX 4090 not being to even avg 30FPS at 1440p High is just ridiculous. 

 

Now I'll give the benefit of the doubt to the devs that maybe on High presets there are some settings that just tank CPU perf like crowd density, etc... But if its just graphical tweaks for the most part then from the graphs the game is CPU bound somewhere around 70FPS with 5600X. 

CPP in his video did suggest turning down LOD distance I think it was. It will be interesting to see how CPU and GPU scaling works when I get my hands on it.

 

I think the more interesting question is not so much what the maximum frame rates end up, but where the lows are. If I can get 60+ fps on a mature city I'd be happy.

 

15 minutes ago, WereCat said:

But considering that devs themselves are agreeing the game runs bad then I just see no reason to be defending the bad performance in the first place. 

 

Also I disagree with the argument that some issues were present in the 1st game too... Why does that even matter? Shouldn't you want these issues fixed? 

New game, new start. I'm guessing most early players of CS2 will be existing players of CS1, so comparing it to the older game is inevitable. We certainly want the best gaming experience possible. Devs have been open about problems, so we may suffer a little early on but hope they can improve things down the line.

 

15 minutes ago, WereCat said:

I'm going based on the article from

 

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

 

So it's possible that some of the performance issues have been resolved by todays or tomorrows release. 

 

Once the actual release day benches are out I'll assess my opinion on the matter. 

I haven't gone through that article yet, not awake enough for a machine translation. CPP in his video mentioned a recent update improved nvidia perf a bit but saw some regressions on AMD, if I'm not misremembering.

 

Release is 24th on Steam, where I ordered it. They usually make things live early US time, so it'll be some time in the afternoon for me in Europe. Maybe this will be different, I don't know.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, WereCat said:

hold back games that run like crap even on high end HW. 

Except the important part is why. Lets assume that the game actually isn't badly made it's just actually hard to run, which isn't unrealistic since it's a city builder and those are actually hard to run if they aren't devoid of game features etc.

 

So as much as you think things should run well on the SteamDeck that doesn't actually mean it's possible or ALL games should. A game like Apex is objectively nothing like Cities Skylines other than they render images on your screen.

 

1 hour ago, WereCat said:

RTX 4090 not being to even avg 30FPS at 1440p High is just ridiculous. 

 

1 hour ago, WereCat said:

Now I'll give the benefit of the doubt to the devs that maybe on High presets there are some settings that just tank CPU perf like crowd density, etc... But if its just graphical tweaks for the most part then from the graphs the game is CPU bound somewhere around 70FPS with 5600X. 

 

We'll have to see what those graphical presets actually do and if it's actually the GPU and the graphical settings that relate directly to the frame rate or the preset options do more that we don't currently know about.

 

If turning up the preset means there are more cars, people, tress etc now on the screen moving and requiring both CPU and GPU logic processing then it may not just be the fact that the GPU can't handle the load, for all we know the GPU is just progressively more and more in wait state as the presets get turned up. GPU busy is a very timely metric we can now look at.

 

I tend to think it's a combination of both, I'm a very active player of city builders and similar games and this smells very similar and like every game before it, runs well for the first hour then just ever increasing march towards unplayable start a new game.

 

1 hour ago, WereCat said:

Also I disagree with the argument that some issues were present in the 1st game too... Why does that even matter? Shouldn't you want these issues fixed?

That's absolutely not the point. The point is ALL city builder games become unplayable at some point due to how large the city gets. It's actually not possible to avoid unless you restrict the map to be so small it's not possible to get in to that situation which also leads to a bad game play experience i.e. SimCity 2013.

 

I never said there were issues with Cities Skylines 1, just saying the expectations and game play experience that you actually get from these types of games.

 

I'm not exactly surprised by this news/information, not that I'm actually happy about it either but I was never expecting anything vastly better anyway. Maybe not quite like this, but anyway not surprised.

 

1 hour ago, WereCat said:

So it's possible that some of the performance issues have been resolved by todays or tomorrows release. 

Strongly doubt it.

[WereCat]

14 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Except the important part is why. Lets assume that the game actually isn't badly made it's just actually hard to run, which isn't unrealistic since it's a city builder and those are actually hard to run if they aren't devoid of game features etc.

 

So as much as you think things should run well on the SteamDeck that doesn't actually mean it's possible or ALL games should. A game like Apex is objectively nothing like Cities Skylines other than they render images on your screen.

 

 

 

We'll have to see what those graphical presets actually do and if it's actually the GPU and the graphical settings that relate directly to the frame rate or the preset options do more that we don't currently know about.

 

If turning up the preset means there are more cars, people, tress etc now on the screen moving and requiring both CPU and GPU logic processing then it may not just be the fact that the GPU can't handle the load, for all we know the GPU is just progressively more and more in wait state as the presets get turned up. GPU busy is a very timely metric we can now look at.

 

Yes, that's what I've hinted at with

 

1 hour ago, WereCat said:

 

 

Now I'll give the benefit of the doubt to the devs that maybe on High presets there are some settings that just tank CPU perf like crowd density, etc... But if its just graphical tweaks for the most part then from the graphs the game is CPU bound somewhere around 70FPS with 5600X. 

 

(obviously depends on how the game was tested). 

 

 

 

 

14 minutes ago, leadeater said:

 

 

That's absolutely not the point. The point is ALL city builder games become unplayable at some point due to how large the city gets. It's actually not possible to avoid unless you restrict the map to be so small it's not possible to get in to that situation which also leads to a bad game play experience i.e. SimCity 2013.

 

I never said there were issues with Cities Skylines 1, just saying the expectations and game play experience that you actually get from these types of games.

 

I'm not exactly surprised by this news/information, not that I'm actually happy about it either but I was never expecting anything vastly better anyway. Maybe not quite like this, but anyway not surprised.

As is pointed out in the article, there are massive stuttering issues regardless of settings and city size. 

 

I've played CS1 and Anno 1800 and have never had such issues as I saw on some footage of CS2 and was also pointed out in the article I've linked and some others as well. 

 

Though there was one article where they tested with 3400G and RX 590 and said it was fine at Low... But provided no numbers. 

[Stahlmann]

A 4090 is not even scratching 30 fps on 1440p high. 

1080p low is basically required for an average gaming PC to even hit 60 fps.

Most of the time people throw "unoptimized" around without even really knowing what it means. But that's just on another level. Not even Arma 3 has performance this bad, and it's notorious for being a game that runs bad.

[leadeater]

49 minutes ago, WereCat said:

As is pointed out in the article, there are massive stuttering issues regardless of settings and city size. 

 

I've played CS1 and Anno 1800 and have never had such issues as I saw on some footage of CS2 and was also pointed out in the article I've linked and some others as well. 

I wasn't really meaning from stutters, I'm aware that's a problem here, but what stops me from continuing very long game plays of city builders is the actual FPS and also gameplay grinds to a halt eventually. The stutters and low average FPS performance are separate issues.

 

That's what happens to me in CS1, Cities XL/XL Platnum/XXL, SimCity 3000 etc. It also happens in RTS and TBS games like Sins of a Solar Empire, GalCiv, Supreme Commander etc. If you don't try and win fast then ughhhh the games end up coming to a crawl. I like to win Sins by capturing every planet and you simply cannot play that game without the mod to force dock squadrons or change them to one "super-sized squadron" heh.

 

I honestly don't enjoy that it's a thing but I can't see it changing to be honest, huge maps, huge scale objects will crush every computer at some point, if the game scale allows it.

 

Anyway I fully expect the CS2 stutters to be there at release and also for the next 6 months, that is my realistic expectations. Add in a good chance the stutters will never be 'truly' fixed. At least not until a many years later re-write with a massive expansion.

[Mark Kaine]

While its true, we should be happy devs finally starting to utilize newer hardware (features) more (are they really though???) on the other hand i don't really see why they can't have "backward compatibility options"...

 

So this new fancy DX17UltraUltimate(tm) effect isn't gonna work on ancient PCs? big whoop!

 

i still think its simple optimization issues most of the time and devs being buddy buddy with hardware manufacturers (read GPU manufacturers) pushing people to buy new hardware-for no real reason lol.

 

 

They do the same with windows,  some games *need* certain windows update versions or they won't even start... it makes no sense, it also doesn't make sense "backwards compatibility modes" ala windows 7(tm) don't work... there should always be a way to make these work (aka just don't use this fancy new effect and we good... sometimes modders can do it, but not always) 

 

 

Same goes for Vram/ram requirements... its great when games use a lot of Vram, that doesn't mean they couldn't run with lighter textures, etc though... typically its a simple slider, has to be programmed with that in mind first though obviously...

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

45 minutes ago, leadeater said:

honestly don't enjoy that it's a thing but I can't see it changing to be honest, huge maps, huge scale objects will crush every computer at some point, if the game scale allows it.

reminds me of Monster Hunter World  - game had minimum requirement of 8GB *with "HD texture pack... but it wasn't an issue running that on a 1060 back then even, you just had to lower settings a bit... but the other thing the game did, was load the gigantic maps (and monsters) all at once before a match ie "hunt" started , so you never had any loading or wait times during a hunt (which would typically take / last about 45 minutes each)

 

i thought this was very forward thinking from the devs at the time - and it was never an actual hard requirement,  the game also ran on a potato  - with "potato settings"... remember playing it on my ancient laptop at like 600p... lol. But it worked!!

[porina]

21 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

While its true, we should be happy devs finally starting to utilize newer hardware (features) more (are they really though???) on the other hand i don't really see why they can't have "backward compatibility options"...

I don't think it applies to this game. There doesn't seem to be any radical new effects like RT to push the hardware requirements. It is probably more a brute force thing to draw all the detail as well as simulate it.

 

21 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

So this new fancy DX17UltraUltimate(tm) effect isn't gonna work on ancient PCs? big whoop!

That's for the Alan Wake 2 thread  I don't feel it too big a loss. 

 

21 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

i still think its simple optimization issues most of the time and devs being buddy buddy with hardware manufacturers (read GPU manufacturers) pushing people to buy new hardware-for no real reason lol.

I don't feel there's collusion going on there. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Not calling devs stupid, but game companies especially at management level, definitely.

 

It feels like the major stages are: 1, get it minimally feature complete, 2, get it working somewhat ok, 3, polish it. Ship point often seems to be somewhere between 1 and 2 now, where ideally we should be playing it in phase 3+.

 

21 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

They do the same with windows,  some games *need* certain windows update versions or they won't even start... it makes no sense

It makes some sense. Certain features were implemented in Windows at particular times. Maybe not the best example, if you want DirectStorage you're not going to go too far back in Windows versions to use it. The other side is simple dev testing. The number of variables multiplies very fast when it comes to testing. If MS don't support a version of OS any more, I feel it is entirely fair for game devs to drop support also. Note unsupported doesn't necessarily mean doesn't work, but if it doesn't work, don't expect any help to get it to work.

 

[Mark Kaine]

12 minutes ago, porina said:

Not calling devs stupid, but game companies especially at management level, definitely.

yeah, devs basically get to choose if we call them dumb or lazy, but we gonna call them "something" if their games don't work, right!?

 

12 minutes ago, porina said:

I feel it is entirely fair for game devs to drop support also. Note unsupported doesn't necessarily mean doesn't work, but if it doesn't work, don't expect any help to get it to work

yeah... but what i mean is it won't even run, because it does a version check on startup... seems very superficial and sus... especially because sometimes that check can just be disabled and then it suddenly works without issues! 

 

12 minutes ago, porina said:

don't think it applies to this game. There doesn't seem to be any radical new effects like RT to push the hardware requirements. It is probably more a brute force thing to draw all the detail as well as simulate it.

i get it... its a simulation... but then they also could just have a "simulation lite" setting...

 

 

reminds me of these Bethesda games where when you get a certain amount of items it just comes to a never ending crawl... this is never excusable in my opinion,  just people not doing their job.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

 

 

12 minutes ago, porina said:

That's for the Alan Wake 2 thread  I don't feel it too big a loss. 

oh... yeah, right.... 

 

 

14 minutes ago, porina said:

It feels like the major stages are: 1, get it minimally feature complete, 2, get it working somewhat ok, 3, polish it. Ship point often seems to be somewhere between 1 and 2 now, where ideally we should be playing it in phase 3+.

 

this is why i like games that use proprietary engines and often made by the devs who invented the engine too, but not many of those out there anymore it seems, Capcom often does it, i feel like RE engine is a regression from Framework tho... Koei Tecmo also often seems to do it... their games are often very polished and unique (such as Fatal Frame series, or DOA, even though DOA6 sucked lol) 

 

 

 

 

[porina]

10 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

i get it... its a simulation... but then they also could just have a "simulation lite" setting...

I feel the problem is in two parts. The simulation I'd consider separate from the graphical side, even if both can compete for the same CPU resources at times. For a higher end CPU with plenty of cores, maybe they could divide it better so draw usage is prioritised somewhat over the simulation, to keep things looking good and responsive. I guess the problem with that is if you don't have many cores to go around, then how do you balance what resources go where?

 

Because of this thread I did fire up CS1 a moment ago and looked closer at its behaviour. If I load up one of my vanilla (no mod) cities, and zoom in, I can drop to an average of 15fps. I can still pan and move around smoothly because I have a native G-sync display, so it is within its VRR range. If I had a limited VRR range display, I guess V-sync would have to go off. Anyway, looking at hardware usage, it was curious. VRAM was maxed out as soon as I loaded the map. I don't think it needed all of it, but it took it all anyway. There wasn't any bus loading to suggest it was swapping into ram. CPU usage was about 30% overall of my 7920X, but it was obvious there were two cores getting hammered with light usage on the remainder. This is the sort of thing that could be improved on because I still had a lot of CPU available, if it could scale better. GPU (4070) was only around 30% usage at 1440p. I didn't check the settings but it is probably on max/high. On the GPU wait time thing, I forget the numbers but it kinda agreed with the usage. There was GPU available. It wasn't the limit.

 

Need to look at CS2 in similar detail when I get it.

[Monkey Dust]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

i get it... its a simulation... but then they also could just have a "simulation lite" setting...

From one of the videos I've seen on the subject, unfortunately I can't remember which one, noted that his GPU was maxed, not the CPU. Which seems odd, as while it definitely looks better than CS1, it doesn't look that good. But if that is the common performance constraint, not just a quirk of that guys PC, a simulation lite mode wouldn't help much.

 

I guess they must be reasonably confident in fixing it, as the console release has only been delayed, not scraped. Going to be interesting to see how the Series S handles it...

[Mark Kaine]

17 minutes ago, Monkey Dust said:

From one of the videos I've seen on the subject, unfortunately I can't remember which one, noted that his GPU was maxed, not the CPU. Which seems odd, as while it definitely looks better than CS1, it doesn't look that good. But if that is the common performance constraint, not just a quirk of that guys PC, a simulation lite mode wouldn't help much.

 

I guess they must be reasonably confident in fixing it, as the console release has only been delayed, not scraped. Going to be interesting to see how the Series S handles it...

one thing, @porina also mentioned... a lot of games just don't have good multicore/thread support,  ie you got these fancy high end 12 core+ cpus, but games often still just run on 1-2 of them effectively,  thus creating huge bottlenecks... so wouldn't surprise me - at all - if that's the case here too. 

tldr: it *is* an optimization issue,  not sure how else to call this antiquated practice. 

 

One of the reasons my favorite engine until further notice will be MT Framework (mt standing for multi threading) 

pretty sure its from 2006 or something but still viable to this day (not actively used anymore tho afaik) 

[Kisai]

On 10/22/2023 at 4:55 AM, Arika said:

 

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

 

 

I don't know. Depends on your perspective.

 

If you release TOO bleeding edge (CyberPunk 2077, and FFXIV Version 1.0 both are textbook examples of trying to be too far ahead of the curve, and various other high end games (eg Nier Automata, FFXV)) what happens is that people are unable to play the game in any shape or form, and thus it tanks the review scores. In the case of CP2077 and FFXIV, eventually what happened is they "scaled down" the game engine to work on more hardware, but ultimately what they really did was "scaled back" the hardware requirements by making everything look worse in many contexts. People will whine and complain that the game isn't optimized, when really, it IS optimized, just not for potato hardware.

 

If you release TOO far behind, for example, releasing something that still uses OpenGL or DX9 or DX10 instead of Vulkan or DX12, then people will complain that their CPU and GPU are being underutilized, and then all the modders come out of the woodwork to try and improve it, if the game is entertaining enough (eg Skyrim.) For what it's worth Bethseda's RPG game engine is awful in so many ways, yet it has a pretty vast modding community.

 

When it comes to certain types of games, eg Simcity-style games, there is a lot of CPU-oriented logic that goes on, that not everything can be pinned on the actual GPU being the bottleneck. You have to draw a line somewhere where the game will work on "enough" computers, but not necessarily everyone's. Cause I assure you that the highest end configurations are pretty rare, and the most common configurations are pretty close to "potato", and yes I'm calling GTX/RTX x50/x60 parts potatos. These are meant to be 1080p cards at most. Sim games tend to be less GPU-bound and more CPU-bound simply because they are doing a lot of "Virtual people" sub simulations (in SC4000 you could quite literately click on people and follow them around) Yet, games like SC4000 barely let you make a city more than 1KM long. If you tried to import real topography, you'd be lucky if you could get about 20 city blocks in any direction. City Simulators can not actually simulate a real world city at scale.

 

[Stahlmann]

41 minutes ago, Kisai said:

People will whine and complain that the game isn't optimized, when really, it IS optimized, just not for potato hardware.

Most PC gamers just expect to set everything to ultra and be done with it. But ultra is rarely optimized towards a balance of performance and looks. In almost every case it prioritizes visuals even beyond diminishing returns while disregarding performance.

 

Somehow a PC gamer's ego is easily hurt when they have to turn the settings down to high because that somehow means their PC is a potato.

 

That's why i think the term "unoptimized" is thrown around way too often. People just tend forget that there are actual graphics settings below ultra when talking about performance and accessibility.

[porina]

57 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

Most PC gamers just expect to set everything to ultra and be done with it.

Not most, but those with high end hardware. At least 80/90 level maybe. Or high for the resolution. I didn't fear 1080p with a 3070 when it was current.

 

Elsewhere: the pre-download for the game has started. 50GB coming down now.

[Senzelian]

On 10/22/2023 at 1:55 PM, Arika said:

it has already been confirmed that it will not be releasing with mod support

It has mod support. It just doesn't have Steam Workshop support. They're using their own workshop.

[Arika]

2 hours ago, Senzelian said:

It has mod support. It just doesn't have Steam Workshop support. They're using their own workshop.

https://www.eurogamer.net/cities-skylines-2s-official-mod-support-wont-arrive-until-after-release

 

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Paradox has confirmed Cities: Skylines 2 won't be getting official mod support until sometime after next week's release, with the feature set to arrive alongside its first wave of modding tools.

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As for Cities: Skylines' imminent sequel, Paradox broke the news that mods would not be officially supported at launch in a developer diary shared on its website. And while it hasn't yet offered an estimated time of arrival for the feature, it's now published a second mod-focused developer update explaining official mod tools and mod support will arrive simulataneously post-release, once Cities: Skylines 2's all-in-one Editor leaves beta testing.