Is 50 FPS a huge issue?
I play a lot of city builders and so long as the UI is still smooth I really don't notice any gameplay difference between 30fps and 60fps.
I put 8 hours into Frostpunk before realizing I was limited to 30FPS.
I play a lot of city builders and so long as the UI is still smooth I really don't notice any gameplay difference between 30fps and 60fps.
I put 8 hours into Frostpunk before realizing I was limited to 30FPS.
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.
Again, this is a simulation game. If I ask the game to spit out more detail and graphics than can be physically supported by today's technology, I guess I don't necessarily see this as a design fault.
Why enable those heavy, performance crippling post processing filters by default?
From what I can find in this comment section, and I guess this has to be taken with a grain of salt, performance doesn't scale. It seems we max out at 50fps on a beefy 13th gen Intel with the fastest GPU available, but then there's a couple comments with mid-range hardware where performance is nearly identical.
To be clear: I had to turn the quality down to much worse than I recall Cities Skylines 1 looking in order to get worse performance than Cities Skylines 1.
The major complaint here is not "I cannot max the settings on my mediocre hardware", but rather "I cannot mediocre the settings on my max hardware"; the performance is bad at any level, but my hardware, while not top-of-the-line, should be able to run a game like this at 4K playable, or at 1080p while looking awesome and running great. Instead, I get 1080p with a mix of medium/low settings in order to get it looking pretty okay in most aspects.
This assumes Cities Skylines 2 is using some next gen graphics technology when in practice it is a Unity game without any cutting edge graphics. Another comment mentioned they are doing 10k+ draw calls per frame - it's just poorly optimized.
As a city builder it has not just dynamic geometry (which makes graphics optimization more challenging) and lots going on on screen like DSP, but also a complex agent based simulation of a city, its transportation, its economy, and individual agent AIs. It is far more complex than most games despite not being graphically intensive. And do note that as far as cities builders go, it's also one of the most ambitious graphically. My personal opinion is they deserve some slack as long as the game continues to improve.
Yes, scalability towards the future is good -- but not at the detriment of player performance now.
If the player base doesn't stick around during our current dark-times medieval technology stack, there won't be a player base when we have whatever future tech makes it playable -- see the problem?
You're forgetting the increasing popularity of the Steam Deck where even 60 FPS is a luxury so game devs should definitely have that as a target.
The Steam hardware survey suggests otherwise to my eyes; it's often easy to forget working in tech that a lot of Steam customers have relatively shit hardware:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
While they don't track monitor peak supported refresh, just looking at the rest of the results suggests to me high-refresh gaming (over 60FPS) is going to be relatively niche at best. Lots of PC gaming specs I take for-granted on my own builds or consider "average" are actually not that common.
I absolutely agree 60fps should be considered the floor for most modern PC games running on "reasonable" hardware though, 30fps belongs to the past.
Woahhh
I wouldn't read too much into these stats.
This is probably one of the best public sources of data we have on the topic of what hardware actual PC gamers are using.
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.
Games get mocked for locking to 60hz, 30hz would get them laughed at outright.
In my experience 30 FPS is perfectly fine for a game like this, I'm not sure what do you mean about "scrolling" ?
It's the much more fast paced, mostly first person games that really need those 60+ FPS...
A top down city sim 'scrolls' up/down/left/right around a map, which is a movement that is strongly associated to screen tearing -- which i'm not really sure is a relevant thing to bring up given the variety of v-sync options available.
Even a game locked at 30fps that 'scrolls' often shouldn't experience significant tearing with the options out there.
Considering something like Simcity 2000/3000. Visual update is probably in single digits FPS most of the time, but the input cursor is very smooth.
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.
Undervolting also reportedly works really well in laptop nvidia chipsets, FYI.
> 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.
Blur Busters explains:
A bit unfair since most people aren't gaming at 4K (Steam hardware survey puts it at 3.29%), but still
Well-compensated people (like engineers) are more likely to own a 4K monitor and high-end GPU, so I meant to convey that there's probably a large overlap with the type of people who play city builders (like engineers), so they really should have accounted for that.
It was only after I bought my 4K 120Hz OLED that I found out how popular they are for sims, including pinball. It's been awesome.
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?
I remember easily getting frame rates far in excess of my monitor's top refresh rate back in 1999.
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.
Regardless, the problem is blown out of proportion. I think we can give it some weeks and 4090 performance issues will be in the past.
LOL. You just proved my point.
> I'm at 35fps on low setting
You can admit that you exaggerate.
But also, yes, even in a city builder low for is very annoying when you're used to the smoothness of 100+.