Cities Skylines 2 runs with 20fps on an Nvidia RTX4090

It's a point of personal pride for me to really understand what the machine is and what it's doing. Programming this way is working with the machine rather than trying to beat it into submission like you do with high level languages.

It seems a lot of programmers just see the CPU as a black box, if they even think about it at all. I don't expect more than a couple percent of programmers would truly grok the modern x86 architecture, but if you stop to consider how the CPU actually executes your code, you might make better decisions.

In the same vein, very high level languages are a big part of the problem. It's so far abstracted from the hardware that you can't reason about how it will actually behave on any real machine. And then you also have an invisible iceberg of layer upon layer upon layer of abstraction and indirection and unknowable, unreadable code that there's no reasonable way to know that your line of code does what you think and nothing else.

Modern software practices are bad and we should all throw away our computers and go back to the 8086. Just throw away the entire field of programming and start again.

Things are slow because we prefer ease of development for these extraordinarily large and complex projects we call video games.

I think the smart thing really is to work it all out at a high level and then target the slow, considered and expensive fixes to where they're really needed.

I'm not excusing obviously lazy development though, but I do think we need to remember how crazy the scope of newer games can be. Imagine showing MSFS2020 to someone from 10-15 years ago; much of the earth scanned in and available for you to fly over, of course there are perf hiccups.

I take issue with "only got 50fps". This is not Counter Strike or a game that demands 300fps. 50fps (if your 1% lows are within reason) is completely playable.

These two issues were glaringly, obviously wrong in core modules, and 100% reproducible.

Both were bad queries (static but parameterized). One resulted in an error from the DB server, and the other was a full join rather than filter by parameter (x=x vs x=:x), so spectacularly wrong results. Both were triggered by doing typical operations in our application.

Both issues had been in our code for many, many months, yet somehow the thousands of users we have across our several hundred customers somehow didn't report or experience these issues.

I fixed both issues in less than 15 minutes.

This isn't the first time. Sometimes I'm amazed how long such glaring issues manages to survive out in the wild amongst our customers.

Not saying they didn't know. Just saying that sometimes these things just happen.

It runs fine but it is ugly. Still enjoying it for now, hoping they fix it before my cities get too big.

  That's not fair.

As someone that has played C:S 8 years ago and last year, I'll tell you, not really, at least, not from people like paradox.

I don't think that's accurate. There's tons of complaints and legit issues with performance for sure, but I don't think making up numbers (likely grossly exaggerated) is helpful.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17fsdx9/hav...

Post-launch, it's perfectly playable for a lot of people. Even on older cards. Performance is by no means good, but it's not a slideshow like everyone was worried it would be pre-release.

(fwiw I also tested this on a 2070. It wasn't great at 1440p but was performing just as well as my 4090 on 1080p)

So PC ports are less efficient because they don't have such continuous, low latency access to memory and the best solution (cheapest?) is usually to just dump everything into VRAM and require more memory. It's frustrating when you can buy a game on a PS5 and it plays great but the PC port needs at least double the specs to run well.

I guess PC gaming was kind of always expensive on the high end but the low end is just disappearing entirely when devs aren't allowed to spend time optimizing at all.

That logo was the dumbest idea ever.

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/PlayerSettings.Spla...

This selective limitation has probably had a significant negative effect on Unity's reputation.

If that isn't damning with faint praise, I don't know what is.

That's the neat part, I'm an actual game dev and I know you're never "given the time". I'm sure the talent here could and will fix many of these issues, but at the end of the day publishers want to ship something (especially in this economy).

That being said most simulation games are usually memory-latency and memory-bandwidth limited, not compute limited.

Over the last 10 years, my favorite simulation games have been Factorio, Tropico (4 and 6), OpenTTD, and Two-point Hospital.

The Anno games are my all around favorite. 1404 is my favorite, but honestly 1800 is probably the best.

Banished spawned an entire genre unto itself even as it hasn't aged gracefully. These survival sims have a lot more "bite" to them. Try Planetbase for a more streamlined experience. Timberborn if you like physics. Also have heard good things about Farthest Frontier.

And then there's Frostpunk which is an all-around amazing experience. The theming and mood rivals any first-person cinematic shooter.

A city sim could be made massively more performant using a data oriented architecture like Unity DOTS or any other ECS style engine

> Maybe your city runs slowly

If the simulation is running slow that has a much more detrimental on the quality of game play than jumping from 45 fps to 75 fps. Sure, it’s a simulation, but it’s primarily a game, not a weather model. And I say this as an early adopter of high hertz monitors and a frequent fps player. I absolutely need high frames and low input latency in a competitive PvP game, but in a strategy game, it’s much more important that the tick rate is fast enough that it’s interesting. A slow sim is boring, and it’s not just me, people complain about this all the time in (late game) Stellaris(another Paradox title).

“Hey, remember that game we made in 1995? Let’s update the graphics and rerelease it for the switch at full price!”

I would more compare it to "The air conditioner is broken, and the radio crashes. But it still gets me from home to work."

The stuff needs to be fixed, but the core purpose is absolutely met.

The core purpose of a city builder/simulator is to let you creatively build well-simulated non-buggy beautiful cities. You can absolutely do that. The fact that some volumetric effects are missing, or that you can't do it in 4K is absolutely a problem, and the devs should fix it.

But let's not pretend like this is the equivalent of going 10mph on the road without being able to shift gears, come on.

In another comment there was a link to https://twitter.com/AtkosKhan/status/1717525097626349696?s=2... with a note that it can increase FPS by 100% by just removing cim rendering using the game's developer mode, so it *does* seem like cim rendering does have major impact in the game performance, if you have cims to begin with :).

edit: Curious coincidence though that there are LOD improvements in the C:S2 hotfix released yesterday: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/patch-notes-for...

https://www.videogamer.com/news/cities-skylines-2-teeth-perf...

> “Citizen lifepath feature does not tie to citizen geometry and does not affect the performance figures of the characters. We know the characters require further work, as they are currently missing their LODs which affect some parts of performance. We are working on bringing these to the game along general LODs improvements across all game assets. Characters feature a lot of details that, while seemingly unnecessary now, will become relevant in the future of the project.“

So I guess sometimes these things can elude professional game developers over years of development.

It's usually a pretty obnoxious effect even in action games, the first thing to turn off if the option exists...

A bit unfair since most people aren't gaming at 4K (Steam hardware survey puts it at 3.29%), but still

But it's the fact that these figures are being seen with the most powerful consumer graphics card (on a brand new unpopulated game map) that's the problem.

30fps is fine for lots of games. Especially for stuff that doesn’t require super twitchy gameplay.

If somebody really cares about 60fps or 120fps, fine. But the developers have some effects they want to implement, and if some of them don’t fit into 8.3ms, let those of us who don’t mind 30fps enjoy them, right?

But if that's with an empty map, it's an ominous sign for people who plan to build a city in this city building game, as rendering usually slows as polygon count increases.

And if it's with an $1800 GPU, its an ominous sign for the 99.3% of gamers who don't have an $1800 GPU.

And if that's at 1440p - well, I'd wager a lot of the folks with a $1800 GPU also have a 4k screen.

> I put 8 hours into Frostpunk before realizing I was limited to 30FPS.

Yes, and I have beaten games that rendered improperly at sub-30FPS as a kid, because the requirement was 16MB of VRAM, while my card only had 8. But that's just as irrelevant to the point being made.

The problem is that we're talking about the absolute highest end consumer card sold by nVidia rendering a blank map, without such a framerate lock in place. If it's not locked, then that framerate is the product of a performance bottleneck somewhere. With a modern gaming PC, "performance bottleneck" also means you're sitting next to a moderately powerful space heater.

But also, yes, even in a city builder low for is very annoying when you're used to the smoothness of 100+.

The only workaround I can think of that wouldn't also defeat the point of having VRR would be to add some in-engine low framerate compensation artifically boost the reported framerate to a multiple of the real framerate, but I have yet to see any games that actually do this.

Before it was released, they told everyone that the game was not optimized graphically, and the minimum specs were already high. It was quite clear that there is still more work to be done to get it in a better state. So, not sure why you have this "cynical" take. This isn't something they are trying to deceive people with. I'm not even in the market to buy the game, and I know this.

I don't want the UI to look horrible on my 27" 1440p monitor.

So if I have a budget PC, I should be content with running this game at Nintendo 64 resolution? Or I guess it's on me to fork over $1,000 for a high-end GPU if I want to run it at 2/3 the resolution of a midrange mobile phone, as you suggest.

It's true that your eyes(or brain?) can get used to the 30fps after some time. But if you compare them side by side...

Let's take motion blur as an example: It's a very expensive to do it as a real-time VFX - so we cheat and approximate it - that doesn't that look good most of the time - because we often have to cut too many corners and end up with a poor approximation.

You're generating very slow images that a computer believes is a facsimile of reality that, unfortunately, don't represent motion blur very well, so they might be "24fps", but they look wrong compared to reality, and you probably can't conscientiously tell what is wrong, just that something seems to be sightly off.

So it's easier instead to attack the problem from the other side, and generate (or frame generate, that's a thing now) and show 480fps "crisp images" and make human persistence of vision do actual motion blur for you.

The crazy thing is people are actually trained to hate it. When you see smooth motion your brain goes "oh no, this is some cheaply shot camcorder shit, not a quality movie" even though what is really happening is the picture looks better than you expect.

First time I played Transport Tycoon was on my 486, I got a demo of the original game on a floppy disk out of some PC game magazine. Looking back, it's amazing how much game play fit onto a 1.44MB floppy disk. I ended up purchasing the Deluxe version on a CDROM. I ripped the CD and have kept an image of it ever since, which came in handy when I found OpenTTD and wanted to use the original graphics and content. Chris Sawyer and the OpenTTD devs are legendary in my mind.

That said, I don't have a ton of expansions installed and no mods. I have a strong suspicion that some mods are harder on performance than others, especially the over-the-top ones like Gigastructural Engineering.