Terrible Optimization: Cities Skylines 2 GPU Benchmarks & Graphics Optimization Guide
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Date: 2023-10-29
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Comments and reviews: 20
Patrick
Just (after many years) finally got back into gaming rocking a Ryzen 9 7940hs relying on integrated graphics (rx780m). City Builders were also my favorites back in the day. I'm fascinated by the capabilities AMD's APUs offer and decided to try their flagship as my entry machine reusing my old office monitor etc.. Well - CS2 runs and I like it. I'm playing a modified medium preset (in both directions) based on some recommendations from CityPlannerPlays' video for optimizing fps but with high textures and level of detail. It is playable but stutters occur in fast camera movements and are single-digit fps for sure. My APU is set to performance mode and 8GB VRAM (the system is a beelink GTRpro) and the GPU is at its limits but the package has still some room hitting only 59W and not 65W. So I have hope that a growing city will not have such an impact at least from the CPU side of things.
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Just (after many years) finally got back into gaming rocking a Ryzen 9 7940hs relying on integrated graphics (rx780m). City Builders were also my favorites back in the day. I'm fascinated by the capabilities AMD's APUs offer and decided to try their flagship as my entry machine reusing my old office monitor etc.. Well - CS2 runs and I like it. I'm playing a modified medium preset (in both directions) based on some recommendations from CityPlannerPlays' video for optimizing fps but with high textures and level of detail. It is playable but stutters occur in fast camera movements and are single-digit fps for sure. My APU is set to performance mode and 8GB VRAM (the system is a beelink GTRpro) and the GPU is at its limits but the package has still some room hitting only 59W and not 65W. So I have hope that a growing city will not have such an impact at least from the CPU side of things.
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KookyBone
What people and GamersNexus seem to miss here: the most performance hungry thing isn't the graphics, it is the agent based system.... Every single person, has it's pathfinding , goal based on were it lives an how old the person is and what his education is. The agents decide how to reach their goal, if they use public transit or the car for example. Cars even stop for pedestrians crossing the street or when a car has accident it even simulates the collision between cars and even with people walking nearby... Since most of the calculations seem to be parallel, it makes sense to do them on the GPU - and I think the developers working hard to get more performance out of it. Maybe they should show the people what is the problem
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What people and GamersNexus seem to miss here: the most performance hungry thing isn't the graphics, it is the agent based system.... Every single person, has it's pathfinding , goal based on were it lives an how old the person is and what his education is. The agents decide how to reach their goal, if they use public transit or the car for example. Cars even stop for pedestrians crossing the street or when a car has accident it even simulates the collision between cars and even with people walking nearby... Since most of the calculations seem to be parallel, it makes sense to do them on the GPU - and I think the developers working hard to get more performance out of it. Maybe they should show the people what is the problem
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paulsaulpaul
Do any AAA games get released these days in a state the development team can be proud of? What does it take to get a proper nexus between publisher requirements, developer expertise, and management's resource allocation? I must just be getting old, but it seems I just play old games from my younger years. Modern PC games are just anxiety inducing scams. Feels like a scam between the hardware and the software (games) when you have limited income for these rising prices and falling quality. And no one seems to care. Not the developers, the managers, the publishers, or the consumer that keeps throwing money at them.
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Do any AAA games get released these days in a state the development team can be proud of? What does it take to get a proper nexus between publisher requirements, developer expertise, and management's resource allocation? I must just be getting old, but it seems I just play old games from my younger years. Modern PC games are just anxiety inducing scams. Feels like a scam between the hardware and the software (games) when you have limited income for these rising prices and falling quality. And no one seems to care. Not the developers, the managers, the publishers, or the consumer that keeps throwing money at them.
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kozad
This studio takes in enough revenue to hire more devs to work on these large projects, so it's sad to see they had a small team making this game. The first version of the game also runs like ass, I don't get people claiming it runs great on existing PCs. On a 1080 Ti at 1440p, the OG version of CS would drop below 30 fps at times for me, likely due to it being DX9 while running on a multicore CPU, similar to how Sims 3 runs like ass on modern PCs. Never bothered playing CS on my 7900 XTX, but I'll def need to play both games now to see how each performs.
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This studio takes in enough revenue to hire more devs to work on these large projects, so it's sad to see they had a small team making this game. The first version of the game also runs like ass, I don't get people claiming it runs great on existing PCs. On a 1080 Ti at 1440p, the OG version of CS would drop below 30 fps at times for me, likely due to it being DX9 while running on a multicore CPU, similar to how Sims 3 runs like ass on modern PCs. Never bothered playing CS on my 7900 XTX, but I'll def need to play both games now to see how each performs.
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grtninja
Adjusting reflections while zoomed into any fountain will show a performance improvement. every city service building with a fountain is reflecting that building and sky. you will also notice frame rate swings just based on what part of the city you are looking at, the more complex the area, the harder the cpu and gpu will have to work. this game is also very cpu dependent. vram hasn't been an issue on my 4060 ti 16 but it will after the game releases more content.
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Adjusting reflections while zoomed into any fountain will show a performance improvement. every city service building with a fountain is reflecting that building and sky. you will also notice frame rate swings just based on what part of the city you are looking at, the more complex the area, the harder the cpu and gpu will have to work. this game is also very cpu dependent. vram hasn't been an issue on my 4060 ti 16 but it will after the game releases more content.
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s1ubbe
The common issue with Paradox games is that there is no end game. Sure the content is there, but the performance drops so badly you cant or just dont want to play it.
All Paradox games these days suffer from this same extremely bad performance with Stellaris being one of the best examples.
I just cant figure out why they want to handicap all their games by not giving a damn about performance
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The common issue with Paradox games is that there is no end game. Sure the content is there, but the performance drops so badly you cant or just dont want to play it.
All Paradox games these days suffer from this same extremely bad performance with Stellaris being one of the best examples.
I just cant figure out why they want to handicap all their games by not giving a damn about performance
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LajKutya
I'm so glad I took City Planner's advice and tried this on Game Pass first instead of buying. 5600X + RX 6800 with a 4K monitor. At native 4K resolution with medium settings and tweaks (DOF off, volumetrics off) CPP's 100k test city nets me an average 25 FPS - with wild swings between 20-30 depending on the scene in camera - and 1% lows of 10-15 FPS. GPU pegged at 95-98% constantly.
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I'm so glad I took City Planner's advice and tried this on Game Pass first instead of buying. 5600X + RX 6800 with a 4K monitor. At native 4K resolution with medium settings and tweaks (DOF off, volumetrics off) CPP's 100k test city nets me an average 25 FPS - with wild swings between 20-30 depending on the scene in camera - and 1% lows of 10-15 FPS. GPU pegged at 95-98% constantly.
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Doublebrutal
1660 Super here... only get about 18 fps >: pretty rough considering the game looks like shit on low settings and still has awful FPS. I can run Counter-strike 2 maxed out on Source 2 engine at well over 100 fps with 8 x msaa and nothing turned down or off at all. WoW runs beautifully 60fps vsynced... But Skylines is just trash optimisation.
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1660 Super here... only get about 18 fps >: pretty rough considering the game looks like shit on low settings and still has awful FPS. I can run Counter-strike 2 maxed out on Source 2 engine at well over 100 fps with 8 x msaa and nothing turned down or off at all. WoW runs beautifully 60fps vsynced... But Skylines is just trash optimisation.
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Jamie
The game appears to use the HDRP graphics system for Unity which was originally intended for TV & Movie work.
It appears paradox are playing the long game here. It s a brutally painful launch for performance, but the potential for future visuals is huge.
I m not sure if that s the right choice, but it is quite exciting and interesting.
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The game appears to use the HDRP graphics system for Unity which was originally intended for TV & Movie work.
It appears paradox are playing the long game here. It s a brutally painful launch for performance, but the potential for future visuals is huge.
I m not sure if that s the right choice, but it is quite exciting and interesting.
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John
It would have been nice to see a Intel/AMD comparison. I did the same(ish) test (albeit current patch) and my 7800x3D (OC 5.1Ghz) with 4090 FE (OC 3050Mhz) was showing 12% higher than the test even taking the patch uplift into account. This may suggest vCache has an impact?
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It would have been nice to see a Intel/AMD comparison. I did the same(ish) test (albeit current patch) and my 7800x3D (OC 5.1Ghz) with 4090 FE (OC 3050Mhz) was showing 12% higher than the test even taking the patch uplift into account. This may suggest vCache has an impact?
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itech
Weirdly enough i get 60 fps 1080p in menu on everything off on my 1050ti, then around 36fps in empty map, and when i got to around 20k pop i had 15fps. This game is weird as hell, i thought i would get like 10fps from the start on everything off.
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Weirdly enough i get 60 fps 1080p in menu on everything off on my 1050ti, then around 36fps in empty map, and when i got to around 20k pop i had 15fps. This game is weird as hell, i thought i would get like 10fps from the start on everything off.
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Gareth
tried this game yesterday, first time my pc has had a thermal shutdown in years and It was just in the background.
I think I'll wait a while before going back to it.
Another game that needed more time before launch.
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tried this game yesterday, first time my pc has had a thermal shutdown in years and It was just in the background.
I think I'll wait a while before going back to it.
Another game that needed more time before launch.
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LJM
It's a bug how the presets just kinda breaks the game and dips the fps. In my case did a medium preset then tried to change graphics settings manually. Seemed to give me 20+ fps for the same graphics quality.
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It's a bug how the presets just kinda breaks the game and dips the fps. In my case did a medium preset then tried to change graphics settings manually. Seemed to give me 20+ fps for the same graphics quality.
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Baranoeda
Unfortunate, its accurate to say that Caesar IV looks far better than City Skylines 2, on the settings that the wast majority has to play on. Its tragic, but simply true.
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Unfortunate, its accurate to say that Caesar IV looks far better than City Skylines 2, on the settings that the wast majority has to play on. Its tragic, but simply true.
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MIKE
this is just standard paradox quality optimization, see you in 2 years when there's a few dlc out and the spaghetti code has been straightened out.
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this is just standard paradox quality optimization, see you in 2 years when there's a few dlc out and the spaghetti code has been straightened out.
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poilboiler
Let's make a game about building massive cities but not bother with optimization. We need dozens of polygons for every cims teeth!
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Let's make a game about building massive cities but not bother with optimization. We need dozens of polygons for every cims teeth!
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ierosgr
It's been a long time since I ve seen in any kind of bench 3080 (10 / 12 Gb) / 3080 ti or 3080 inside a chart. What is that so?
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It's been a long time since I ve seen in any kind of bench 3080 (10 / 12 Gb) / 3080 ti or 3080 inside a chart. What is that so?
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PinjaNinja
The entire CS community thanks you Steve and the entire GN team, this will surely provide CS2 gamers a better experience!
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The entire CS community thanks you Steve and the entire GN team, this will surely provide CS2 gamers a better experience!
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Ed
Playing with a Ryzen 5-3600 / RTX3060-12gb / 32gb ram and the settings op medium and a coupler disables and i play 60 fps average
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Playing with a Ryzen 5-3600 / RTX3060-12gb / 32gb ram and the settings op medium and a coupler disables and i play 60 fps average
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Bram
Been watching City Planner Plays so much over the years. Glad to see he got some recognition over the benchmarks he did :D
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Been watching City Planner Plays so much over the years. Glad to see he got some recognition over the benchmarks he did :D
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