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

[leadeater]

Watching now:

 

[WereCat]

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

Watching now:

 

The texture issue is quite interesting. You get better quality at lower settings but worse performance at higher settings... lol.

 

And the DoF set to disabled is not the holy grail of performance gain people make it to be.

[Stahlmann]

On 10/29/2023 at 9:29 AM, WereCat said:

The texture issue is quite interesting. You get better quality at lower settings but worse performance at higher settings... lol.

Actually this can make sense. If the higher texture quality exceeds the VRAM limit, then they will be downscaled to fit within the buffer. So having initially lower res textures that don't exceed the VRAM limit can result in a higher res outcome.

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

Actually this can make sense. If the higher texture quality exceeds the VRAM limit, then they will be downscaled to fit within the buffer. So having initially lower res textures that don't exceed the VRAM limit can result in a higher res outcome.

It does not exceed VRAM. It was tested with RTX 4090.

[Stahlmann]

5 minutes ago, WereCat said:

It does not exceed VRAM. It was tested with RTX 4090.

Ok then scratch that, it doesn't make sense. Normally texture quality doesn't have any performance impact as long as you don't go over your Vram limit.

[Senzelian]

I've been playing it now for a few hours and performance is definitely not great. However, with relatively fast hardware its very playable. I'm running it on max settings and I average around 50-60 FPS with a population of around 5000 ppl.

 

(Ryzen 7 5800X, RX 7900XT, 32GB RAM)

 

Of course this is still not accepable and I hope they are going to release some patches soon that will improve performance.

[porina]

I'm at 29 hours. I think I'm seeing quirks in the sim, which to me is more annoying than anything on the graphics side. 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, porina said:

I'm at 29 hours. I think I'm seeing quirks in the sim, which to me is more annoying than anything on the graphics side. 

I want to get it but I'm very skeptical, while I do have a 6800 XT I still only have a 4930k so not keen on wasting my money on a game that won't really play haha.

[porina]

Steam cloud sync decided to die on me but I tried to do a simulated test with a weak CPU. As such it wont be exact comparison.

 

11700k turbo off (3.6 GHz), 3070, 4k medium + turn off DOF, motion blur, V-sync

Test 1: 8 cores: 20-30fps in a >100k pop city

Test 2: 4 cores: 20-30fps in a >50k pop city

Higher fps when zoomed in e.g. if doing changes / detailing. Lower fps zoomed out (overview)

 

While I didn't do long gameplay testing I spend enough to make sure the basics were working as expected.

 

Edit: on the Steam cloud sync problems, I'd suggest turning on autosave which is disabled by default. At least you'd have a local backup in case you encounter the same problem I had. That allowed me to recover my save.

[porina]

Another patch has come out. Most items relate to gameplay mechanics, but there are a few involving graphics:

• Optimizations for area lights
• Prefer rendering small objects after large ones when possible to improve GPU performances in some cases
• Improved shadow LOD calculations to cull irrelevant shadow casters earlier
• Reduced situations where trees and alpha clipped objects would lead to virtual texturing space running out
• Decreased resolution of unnecessary large character textures

At 38 hours in, I'm starting to lean towards the too early release now. Not for graphical performance, but the gameplay mechanics itself still need polish. The updates in this patch, which I have not included here, rebalances the game. It took some time for an existing >200k city to work again, requiring some building mix balancing on my part. I feel they're not done yet. Traffic is generally improved over the 1st game but it still does really stupid things. The bad thing is, some things like late lane changes when leaving highway are also present IRL and causes problems there too. Too realistic?  

 

Full patch notes: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/patch-notes-for-1-0-12f1-hotfix-steam.1606507/

[leadeater]

On 10/31/2023 at 10:39 PM, porina said:

11700k turbo off (3.6 GHz), 3070, 4k medium + turn off DOF, motion blur, V-sync

Test 1: 8 cores: 20-30fps in a >100k pop city

Test 2: 4 cores: 20-30fps in a >50k pop city

Higher fps when zoomed in e.g. if doing changes / detailing. Lower fps zoomed out (overview)

On that CPU could you do 6 cores and downclock to 2.8Ghz? Should be about the same as my 4930k haha

[PocketNerd]

On 10/30/2023 at 3:28 AM, WereCat said:

It does not exceed VRAM. It was tested with RTX 4090.

And? Unless the 4090 has limitless VRAM then it can still be exceeded. However unlikely it may be.

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, PocketNerd said:

And? Unless the 4090 has limitless VRAM then it can still be exceeded. However unlikely it may be.

Have you even watched the video before arguing about nothing? 

[PocketNerd]

3 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Have you even watched the video before arguing about nothing? 

I don’t need to have watched it to prove your statement false on a technicality.

 

That said, I have not had the opportunity to watch it. Now if you said that they tested on a 4090 and vram usage was shown to not have been exceeded, then I’d have no issue.

[porina]

30 minutes ago, leadeater said:

On that CPU could you do 6 cores and downclock to 2.8Ghz? Should be about the same as my 4930k haha

Just running it now. Note there's 2 patches since launch.

11700k at 6 cores 2.8 GHz, 3070, 4k: 25-30+ fps in a >200k pop city. Modified low settings (disable DOF and motion blur). Lows are when I'm somewhat zoomed in on a high density built area, and increases in lower density areas. CPU usage typically around 70-80% so it is pretty much loaded. Looking at task manager it is evenly spread over all threads. GPU usage varies from 60-90% ball park, so there may be some soft CPU limiting going on.

 

I didn't run modified medium settings much as it was dipping to ~16fps which is getting a bit low even for me.

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, porina said:

Just running it now. Note there's 2 patches since launch.

11700k at 6 cores 2.8 GHz, 3070, 4k: 25-30+ fps in a >200k pop city. Modified low settings (disable DOF and motion blur). Lows are when I'm somewhat zoomed in on a high density built area, and increases in lower density areas. CPU usage typically around 70-80% so it is pretty much loaded. Looking at task manager it is evenly spread over all threads. GPU usage varies from 60-90% ball park, so there may be some soft CPU limiting going on.

 

Sweet thanks! Sounds like I should be fine then

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, PocketNerd said:

I don’t need to have watched it to prove your statement false on a technicality.

 

That said, I have not had the opportunity to watch it. Now if you said that they tested on a 4090 and vram usage was shown to not have been exceeded, then I’d have no issue.

It's not VRAM issue

[porina]

Just been made aware of a good write up on some of the technical reasons behind the game's performance problems: https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/

 

If corrected, I wonder how much more perf could come out of it?

[Quackers101]

not stable as a benchmark I guess, but the part about HDRP for unity.

Hopefully at some point it gets better, URP - SRS (custom?) - HDRP to a more unified pipeline.

https://portal.productboard.com/unity/1-unity-platform-rendering-visual-effects/c/1842-scriptable-render-pipeline-coexistence

 

As the city building game that wants to do it at a bigger scale and "always visible" needing a lot of tricks to make it work and look good.

Do wonder about the imposter tool if it could help for some of the stuff, when rendering.

 

As when unreal engine 5.3 or 5.2 added some nice tools for this and graphics, to open world games.