Terrible Optimization: Cities Skylines 2 GPU Benchmarks & Graphics Optimization Guide

Sponsor: Lexar Thor DDR5 RAM on Amazon geni.us/AuxUm9
This benchmark tests GPU performance in Cities: Skylines 2 by Colosssal Order. Cities Skylines 2 is easily the most GPU-intensive city builder we've ever seen, even adjusted for the era. Despite highly intensive simulation happening on the CPU, the GPU ultimately bears disproportionate weight right now. Playing above 1080p is difficult on most cards, with even the RTX 4090 struggling in this game. The testing looks at AMD vs. NVIDIA GPUs (we had crashing problems with Intel) for framerate performance in Cities Skylines 2 at Very Low, Low, Medium, and High settings. We also tested graphics quality and provide some graphics optimize advice for better GPU performance in Skylines 2. The graphics guide includes some comparisons at different settings, quality levels, and discussion of texture loading bugs (even on RTX 4090 levels of VRAM!). This will help you figure out the best GPUs for Cities Skylines 2 at different price and performance targets.
The graphics settings tests will look at Depth of Field, Volumetric lighting effects, Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion, clouds, anti-aliasing, and more.
Find City Planner Plays here: / @cityplannerplays
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RELATED PRODUCTS [Affiliate Links]
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PowerColor RX 6800 XT on Newegg: geni.us/HGGcZC
Or find the 6800 XT on Amazon here: geni.us/skLY
ASRock RX 7800 XT on Newegg: geni.us/q13x
ASUS RTX 4060 on Amazon: geni.us/LzJb1dg
ASUS RTX 4060 Dual on Newegg: geni.us/AE2Xm
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - A Rough Launch
01:56 - Benchmarking GPUs for Cities Skylines 2
03:48 - Population Size GPU Benchmarks
05:04 - Patch Benchmarks & Improvements
07:42 - 1080p Medium GPU Benchmarks
09:05 - Crazy Frametime Pacing
09:52 - 1080p Low Video Card Benchmarks in Skylines 2
12:01 - 1080p Very Low Benchmarks
13:26 - Graphics Setting Methodology
14:40 - Graphics Optimization Benchmarks
16:28 - Impact from the Patch
17:54 - Graphics Comparisons: Shadows
19:19 - Graphics Preset Comparisons (Very Low, Low, Medium, High)
25:16 - Bad Defaults & Bugs
** Please like, comment, and subscribe for more! **
Links to Amazon and Newegg are typically monetized on our channel (affiliate links) and may return a commission of sales to us from the retailer. This is unrelated to the product manufacturer. Any advertisements or sponsorships are disclosed within the video ("this video is brought to you by") and above the fold in the description. We do not ever produce paid content or "sponsored content" (meaning that the content is our idea and is not funded externally aside from whatever ad placement is in the beginning) and we do not ever charge manufacturers for coverage.
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Writing, Testing, Host: Steve Burke
Writing, Research: Patrick Lathan
Video: Vitalii Makhnovets

[@GamersNexus]

If you missed it, check out our prior Baldur's Gate 3 GPU benchmarks for a well-optimized title! kzbin.info/www/bejne/d3LNgouarNCae6c Huge thanks to City Planner Plays for posting his save game files. Check out his content here: kzbin.info/door/8WAaaW2FnctRI9coYJoUdA Grab a PC-themed coaster pack, new mouse mat, or PC building Modmat to support our tests like this! store.gamersnexus.net/

[@didamnesia3575]

1700$ for 40fps is good, right? I mean movies are only 24fps... 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

[@SpecialKthx]

I want Counter-Strike 2 benchmark! also can you test some games with the new intel APO

[@gmailaaaa]

Linus liked this game. Is there a trend here?

[@spartanvi]

Can you guys figure out how to get AMD Fluid Motion Frames to work on this game? The driver level toggle doesn't work, regardless of having exclusive fullscreen and VSync Off. I'm on the Gamepass version btw.

[@MIKEZG]

​@@didamnesia3575movies average 30 fps

[@CityPlannerPlays]

Whoa, I've been watching your channel for years and it's amazing to see our worlds collide! Thanks for the shout out and I appreciate you diving into this deeper!

[@GamersNexus]

HUGE thank you for what you posted. Someone who actually knows how to play the game building a 'real' city is a great benchmark. As fun as it would be to play the game to that point, our jobs revolve around testing things fast -- and spending the time learning the game and building a city would have taken forever just to benchmark it. Feel free to email sometime, maybe we can collab on future content as they patch the game!

[@sphereron]

@@GamersNexus This was a treat I never expected from watching both of your channels. Would love to see an updated performance benchmark after they optimize CS2 more.

[@progenitor_amborella]

@@sphereron”CS2” it’s happening

[@ianb.6582]

Love the idea of a collaboration between you two on how to dial this game in patch by patch.

[@ImperatorSupreme]

I was thinking of saying that GamersNexus would probably love the benchmark files, and apparently they found them regardless! Awesome bit of collaboration.

[@blgDemon]

rtx4090 is a 1080p card. What a time to be alive

[@XiaOmegaX]

Always has been.

[@SSJfraz]

1080p with 2005 graphics.

[@lavaregion6968]

@@XiaOmegaX lol what? the 4090 is insanely powerful and can play some games at 8K even

[@itszortrax]

​@lavaregion6968 1080p

[@Xenaman]

​@@lavaregion6968🤡🤡🤡

[@NotJustBikes]

This was the best analysis of CS2 benchmarks I've seen. I had plans to make a video and a few livestreams about CS2, but in the end I decided not to, because of performance issues. It's fine for gaming channels to promote this game, but my channel is mostly made up of city enthusiasts, not gamers. They're not going to have the latest GPUs and CPUs, and it's likely they'll be disappointed. I have a Radeon RX6650 XT and performance is not great, even at 1080p. I'm sure it will improve, but for now, it's not good enough. Thankfully the base game is quite good, and as you said, that's what's most important. When they resolve the performance issues, I'll be happy to recommend this game.

[@bettermetal8306]

You should make a gaming channel where you can create your “perfect” city!

[@dijikstra8]

As subscriber to all three, NJB, CPP and Gamers Nexus, I would love that! But probably better to wait for bicycles to be properly implemented anyways. Hopefully we can make both sub-par bike gutters and dutch-style separated paths!

[@robertt9342]

CS2, Counter Strike 2 conversations about cities skylines video?

[@DenebTM]

@@robertt9342Cities Skylines 2

[@elliottdegraaf9834]

woah. never expected to see NotJustBikes here, these crossovers are getting crazy

[@willwunsche6940]

The 4090 only getting 70fps at 1080p medium half way through a save is beyond mind blowing 😂

[@_Fernando.]

Especially on a game that graphically looks at least 10 years old

[@handlehaggler]

Oh so its not just me being opinionated about how things look even if you manage to run everything on ultra/high. Looks worse than cs1 i rate

[@floorgang420]

The fact that they managed to add that much draw call and even GI to DX11 is also mind blown.

[@_Dibbler_]

I have 50FPS in 4k with a 4090 and thats enough for such a game. But a little but ridiculous too. Finally a game apart from FS2020 that gets everything out of my system 😅

[@willwunsche6940]

@@_Dibbler_ It's certainly pushing your system to the limit and you are lucky to have it to keep the game in comfortably playable. But I doubt it is taking full advantage of your system or anyone's system for that matter 😂

[@ExoKiller4]

The bizarre thing about this game is that the simulation seems to run quite well, it's truly just the graphics that are slow as hell. That seems like a first for a city builder.

[@TrackmaniaKaiser]

I was wondering if the bad graphics performace is missleading as parts of the simulation get offloaded to the gpu? resulting in the illusion that the simulation is running really well, while it's actually a big part of the problem.

[@unaif.2171]

​@@TrackmaniaKaiserThey didn't bother making proper lod. What are the odds they made that kinda optimization for the sim? Not that it makes much sense, not everything can be GPU offloaded and a city simulation seems one of the worst things to move there.

[@TrackmaniaKaiser]

@@unaif.2171 Well it's the core part of their engine. If the didn't optimize that, any other optimization will be 100% useless as a slower simulation speed will slow down everything else. TransportFever 2 got an optimization where they offloaded some cpu stuff to the gpu. That resultat in an 2x->3x Framerate increase! I was going op from 60fps early game and 30fps midgame to 100 fps early game and 70fps mid game, while the late game actually was playable, something you coudln't say before as the simulation would slow down soooo much, that you would be far below 30fps

[@ALexalex-ss4sb]

i have 400 hours in the first CS and now i have 30 in CS2 in a 4090 7950x3d and i can say the only changes i noticed where mostly the traffic now u can actually fix it before it was almost imposible to fix if u wherent a profesional, also trading and in general exporting materlias feels better, everything else feels the same but with a lot less content

[@fenyrmastermk2902]

​@@ALexalex-ss4sbnow thats dissapointing, honestly i was expecting something so much better, content wont be a problem in the future since they Will eventually upload DLCs. I Will stick with the 1st game until i get a computer from NASA or when you can actually play the game with a mid tier system.

[@sphereron]

Btw the bug with inverse scaling is the "Texture Quality Settings", where Very Low has Mip Bias = 3 and High has Mip Bias = 0. You can see the specifics in the Advanced tab, but for anyone reading, just set this to Very Low.

[@brkbtjunkie]

That makes sense, it’s always been inverse with mip bias settings.

[@GamersNexus]

Does that mean the developer basically used the numerical value incorrectly? Crazy.

[@Anno-gm3yo]

Thank you !!! Thank you !!! this solved my problem !

[@Mike80528]

@@GamersNexus It's important to understand what a function is to understand what "Higher" refers to: "The mipmap bias of the Texture. A positive bias makes a Texture appear extra blurry, while a negative bias sharpens the Texture. Note that using large negative bias can reduce performance, so it's not recommended to use more than -0.5 negative bias. In most cases you can achieve better sharpening of the Texture by using anisotropic filtering." That is from Unity documentation...

[@doltBmB]

That's not a bug.

[@hiho9149]

The shot with the reverse order texture quality on the billboard is comedic gold.

[@JamesC1981]

yeah very amusing

[@isaacsteen4828]

I LOVE that the GTX970 is still being used in benchmarks. It represents older cards, low-power cards, and the used market, all in one. It's still such a great card to aim for, glad to see it getting some love :)

[@CheesyHotDogPuff]

I rocked that bad boy all the way to 2022. Still a great older card.

[@isaacsteen4828]

@@CheesyHotDogPuff I used one until 2020, when I upgraded to a used gtx1080. My brother used a 970 until earlier this year, when he upgraded to a used 3050 :)

[@joey_f4ke238]

I still have mine, insane how it can´t even play this at the lowest but the old game could run max settings

[@tsdobbi]

"I LOVE that the GTX970 is still being used in benchmarks. " Its listed as a minimum requirement for the game. So they likely included it because of that.

[@amnottabs]

performance-wise it used to be on par with the GTX 1060 6GB until vram requirements skyrocketed

[@NosyNorseman]

Developers optimization and GPU prices/performance is a fantastic combo - it’s a “Golden Age” for carefree customer satisfaction 😂

[@pjackson6688]

It’s amazing that since we no longer buy 💿 that games are now released broken

[@RiasatSalminSami]

@@pjackson6688 people keep buying broken games on release, so devs keep releasing broken games. It will never change unfortunately.

[@KimBoKastekniv47]

Nvidia and AMD enjoy this.

[@ideallyjekyl5200]

@pj BIG RIGS OVER THE ROAD RACING. BIIIIIIG MUTHAFUCKIN RIIIIIIIIIGS

[@mechanicalmonk2020]

​@@pjackson6688 I'm old enough to remember the games that released broken on disks and weren't fixed for a long ass time. We naturally don't remember a lot of those.

[@hiddenpk1]

I will say. I appreciate the hard work in getting these reviews out so fast. But with the state of games lately being released and then fixed after I think we would all forgive you for testing much fewer cards until the games become stable. Much love.

[@brovoker34]

Seriously, get a few baseline to see if its even worth more stringent testing.

[@IRefuseToUseThisStupidFeature]

Though I suppose it is still useful for people who want to play right now.

[@miawuwu2255]

Honestly, when you looking at the bigger picture, it was kinda a big f*ck ups. City management genre is one of those genre that so niche many people wouldn't touched it as a their first game or primary game to do a living (kinda like racing simulation or flight simulation) because comparatively to a MMORPG or a PvP, you're basically got control of your what you want in your space instead of hopeful to whatever gacha gods their had which also mean that if you screw up from beginning you could trashed your game. Because of this niche market, you got yourself a very dedicated player that would played your game without hesitant (which i think is also where the problem began). That means you don't want to sacrifice your gameplay or technical aspect just for the sake of visual, because again the people who buy your game are the exact same people with them might be upgrading their pc not so much often. If the developers had been think to that way, they could avoid the mess that they've got. Design or build your game based on what was the slowest pc they get brand new instead of the fastest pc they get.

[@Balc0ra]

I loved their response with "But it's designed to be played at 30fps, so it won't matter" even if it's 1080p on a brand new high end card. I had high hopes for this game. But if you drop by their subreddit, the bugs on top of the FPS made me glad I waited to buy it. Shame as the first one was made in the wake of the failure of Simcity. And it did it so well.

[@darcos7535]

I'm able to get 35+ fps (35k Pop) on a gtx 1080 with an older high core cpu. I'm running 1440p mostly on medium, but did drop some stuff. For me, graphics is not really an issue. No stutter BTW

[@elgonzo7239]

Yeah, you can't make this shit up. It's frigging hilarious really how little shit game devs give about PC gaming these days with few exceptions, even if the largest part of the target customer base for the product are actually PC gamers. Lol...

[@LordTridus]

@@elgonzo7239 This one bit them in the butt on the console end too, since they had to delay the console release by months. With this kind of awful performance even on high end PCs, I'm not sure it would pass console certification at all. Sony won't be pleased seeing this struggling to do 30FPS at 1080p on a PS5 hooked up to a giant 4k living room TV. It would make the whole platform look awful.

[@whizzie3928]

The game doesn't even look good.

[@Junebug89]

That's not what they said? They said "we targeted 30 fps but we aren't there yet". Not "it doesn't matter". I think the PC launch should have also been delayed but at no point have they said "it doesn't matter". They've made it very clear even ahead of the game's launch that they know it matters lol.

[@pyromen321]

I’ve never wished for a source code leak, but I’d love to dive into this. How can you make something look so bad but require so much power to playably render?

[@Fuzzy9001]

My guess is the team was on crunch time and trying to push out all the features as fast as possible with no consideration for optimisation

[@Katniss218]

if it's Unity, and not IL2CPP, you can decompile the game using ILspy or dnSpy

[@GaussianBluff]

If you're still curious, the tldr is that there's many millions of polygon vertices per scene because the models are super detailed and there's no occlusion culling or LOD. Hacker news shared a fairly detailed analysis a few days ago, should still be findable on there.

[@Maartwo]

Homies modeled the citizen's teeth. That should tell you everything.

[@deandollahite4779]

Does fluid dynamics play into it?

[@alienrenders]

I'm a developer (I've implemented megatexturing and other texturing systems). The textures getting blurrier with better settings can be due to multiple factors. The most obvious is that they decreased the max LOD number instead of increasing it. This can happen when you use inverted LOD numbers internally (quite common). Some people like using 0 as the highest resolution id. But if you increase that number, then you're gonna get blurrier textures. For example, if maxLOD = 0 and minLOD = 5 for the minimum setting and the code is set to increase maxLOD for higher settings, you'd get this problem. Don't ask me how I came up with this example :) What I couldn't tell is if they are using oversampling in the higher settings. If so, then the shaders are supposed to adjust to keep reading the same texture LOD (ie. a lower resolution texture than the one demanded by the increased resolution otherwise you get aliasing artifacts). So if there's MORE oversampling at higher settings, it could be that their texture LOD adjustment is off. Sometimes, this adjustment is done twice by mistake because the engine takes care of it and the devs forget to remove the old custom shader code. IOW, an earlier version of the engine didn't automatically account for this, but a later version did and they never updated their shaders so the adjustment is done twice.

[@1Grainer1]

from what i saw, biggest fps hit comes from physical DoF setting, is that something that has to more natural/precise simulation of how eye adjusts for distance?

[@sphereron]

This is caused by the "Texture Quality Settings" option. Setting this to High makes Mip bias = 0 and Filter mode = Trilinear Filtering, whereas Very Low makes Mip bias = 3 and Filter mode = Bilinear filtering. In this case, Mip bias should be 3 to fix the blurry textures issue.

[@vamwolf]

game internal upscaler . seems the old one cant handle the new game engine.

[@yesyes-om1po]

@@1Grainer1 AFAIK DOF isn't that expensive, but I am only experienced in rendering performance, usually you can actually use strong DOF to get better performance by lowering the LOD of what is blurred, its often used in films/games/movies to hide unpolished areas. Which is part of the reason I always disable DOF in games

[@1Grainer1]

@@yesyes-om1po my bro got uplift from 40 to 90- ish fps or more just from disabling DoF and i think physical was default, to it was quite expensive in this case

[@indoorjetpacks]

Excellent additional benchmarking follow up from city planner plays. Didn't know Steve was into city builders! Thanks for the extra info and testing guys. Would be curious to see an update after the console release to see what the optimizations end up being there

[@GamersNexus]

I actually still play them, too! I've been playing Kingdoms & Castles lately!

[@ollehkacb]

Dude, that game makes you lose track of time "Just one more farm, a few more walls, oh I got to build the barracks.

[@arcadeportal32]

​@GamersNexus I have well over 3000hr into Cities Skylines 1, even though CS2 isn't a hit yet, I am sure they will add mod support which by then should fix many of the overly heavy poly models they have in the game with lower ones. I really do like the road tools playing it more now. Getting about 45fps now at med settings.

[@DanielCoffey67]

You have Emperor Rise of the Middle Kingdom I assume? The GOG version includes the higher resolution patch by default.

[@BrammyS]

Been watching City Planner Plays so much over the years. Glad to see he got some recognition over the benchmarks he did :D

[@Mo0shii]

city planner fr :'D

[@mattl4925]

1080p at 30fps target on modern hardware is an insane performance target. This has been a major concern for consumers for like 5-6 years now. I am also one who starts to get headaches dealing with flicker/stutter under ~60fps. Its not just being petty, its hoping consumers get what they paid for without the expense of their health.

[@lemoncake6957]

Uninstall/Refund. The biggest voice. RTX4080 getting under 60fps @1080 is just unacceptable in 2023.

[@_TheDMZ_]

Join the club, also get fuckin headaches when games run sub 30-60

[@squidwardo7074]

@@lemoncake6957 Sadly the people that can afford cards like that aren't the type of people who will boycott games because of bad performance

[@Maartwo]

Devs just chuck some DLSS/FSR or tell their customers to get a 4090. I knew this would happen with these technologies.

[@cooltwittertag]

@@Maartwo this game doesnt even have DLSS tho, its clearly not optimised to use those looking at their recommended specs, they just made the worst optimised game in the world

[@joemarais7683]

I think it was pretty nice of Paradox to let people play CS2 in its Beta stage. I can’t wait for the game to fully release next year when all the bugs are ironed out.

[@SpoonHurler]

Why fund beta testing when the community will do it for you?

[@ThunderingRoar]

and alongside a dozen DLCs

[@-opus]

*free beta testing

[@SpoonHurler]

@@-opus better than free... people are paying to beta test

[@activeentropy]

@@SpoonHurler even better, free marketing.

[@ipotato95]

And this is why buying games at launch just isn’t worth the headache. Waiting a whole month seems to be the time to make a decision

[@alexmills1329]

Or wait a year plus until it’s fully baked and pick it up as a complete game for 30% less than launch pricing and actually be able to enjoy the game. It’s worked wonders for me since I tested it first on cyberpunk.

[@wtfbros5110]

1 year, when its 30% + off

[@sopcannon]

also on gamepass

[@-opus]

I only buy games when I believe all of the expansions have been released and bundled, that is when the game is finished.

[@keppycs]

​@@-opusthat's not their business model. there's likely many many more dlcs to come, just like in cs1

[@smakfu1375]

Thanks Steve! Seriously though, this really helped clean up a lot of obnoxious misinformation around what’s going on with performance settings in this release. It’s pretty nuts that they released it in this condition, but at least now we know what’s what.

[@tmvmihai]

This video actually helped me get from 25-30 fps when zoomed out to 35-40 without it looking any worse as far as I can tell so thank you very much!

[@alexmills1329]

Finally some CS2 benchmarks after all that CS2 drama with AMD.

[@Aliquis.frigus]

AMD drama?

[@alexmills1329]

@@Aliquis.friguspeople got banned for enabling anti lag, AMD had to update the driver to remove the feature and games affected like counter strike won’t even let you play the game with the out of date driver now to prevent accidental bans. Also the bans are being removed over time as found basically

[@sirhawkknightmk3328]

You know the difference between counter strike 2 and city skylines 2 right

[@zbatchDOC]

Counter strike is a great game. But a dogshit video game

[@jasperheal7990]

​@@sirhawkknightmk3328that was indeed the joke

[@gintozlato1880]

The fact that they considered this a relesable state for the game is insane

[@x_voxelle_x]

Paradox is so dumb. They knew better than to make the devs release it in this state.

[@Jedda678]

The worst part is THIS WAS IN THEIR BETA BUILDS. Did they not listen to any feedback from the people they sent these out to? Like how rushed were they? I get it CS:1 released with FPS issues but it ran far better. I would hate to see what people get to when EVERYTHING is unlocked and has buildings, cities, cims, and traffic running on it. This seems like they were making this for future hardware cause there is no way internally at their studios this game even ran close to 60fps.

[@logirex]

People just need a better gpu than the 4090. Clearly the game is next gen 🤦‍♂

[@jorgeaugusto6076]

Here's the thing. They didn't. They even said that. But they said this was the best moment to release the game so they did it anyway

[@x_voxelle_x]

@@jorgeaugusto6076 Hope it's worth the drama and lost sales for them, then.

[@akillersquirrel5880]

Jesus. Your Caesar III mention just jogged some brain cells I forgot existed - I vaguely recall playing the second game for a bit back in the late 90s

[@joshhiroti]

Awesome episode to see. Been addicted to this genre and City Planner Plays vids.

[@sultanofsick]

That fog is absolutely TERRIBLE and as a result the "very low" looks by far the best to me.

[@Tommi462]

Yeah, don't like that bleached look at all. But the trees look terrible without the shadows too.

[@BurntFaceMan]

Ps1 games used fog to make them render less and load faster...maybe the devs were trying for that...

[@teutorixaleria918]

Best settings for me have been medium with fog and DOF turned off and AA custom set to TAA. Subjective but I think it looks the best.

[@DovahFett]

@@BurntFaceMan Old games used fog to hide low rendering distances. GTA San Andreas is a good example of a game that did this.

[@shawnduffy279]

It was the same in CS 1 and most of us disliked the "feature" and turned it off. CO was aware of this so I'm not sure why it was reintroduced/used at all in CS 2. 🤷‍♂️

[@MasterDisaster282]

Damn, this video is so complete. It helped me a lot with optimizing the settings. Thanks a lot!

[@ballercat]

Steve, I also started with Caesar 3 as my first strategy/city builder game. What an absolute gem that game was, it had its flaws but I still go back to it and replay it every few years. Thanks for the reminder!

[@AM-qc3vk]

I'm glad to see that this game is available for Windows 95

[@pegasusted2504]

Lol, I was thinking it looked like a-train on the 486 at its lowest settings :~)

[@anshbalde7101]

One of the first major outlets to give coverage to this mess. Yesterday I tried to search KZbin for benchmarks to confirm about bad user reviews on Steam before making the purchase but to my avail could find no content at all. Finally Steve decided to cover it 😌

[@picard5134]

I was hoping on a Cities Skylines 2 Benchmark from you guys! Great work, thanks. I hope you do one for CPU too. I have a friend who wants to build a PC just for this game. Your data is really helpful in making recommendations for him.

[@eugenehavens]

Your settings for Starfield (another poorly optimized PC game) worked great. Thanks for covering gaming in the same in-depth way you do everything else.

[@ojonathan]

Amazing to see City Planner Plays' map being used for the benchmarking. One interesting thing about the patch, it made the game actually playable at 1440p on my RX 6800, previously it was running at 25fps, with Paradox's recommended settings it was reaching 35-40fps on an empty map. Given that 1080p on a 1440p screen looks terrible, I was playing at 1152p. But now, after the patch, I'm getting 45-55fps at 1440p with 8k pop, and I did tested on a 100k pop map, it hovers around 40-55fps, so things really improved. Also, 100k pop is really hammering the CPU, 3x speed pushes 90% utilization across all the cores on my 5900X, while the GPU sits around 80% utilization (so the CPU will be the bottleneck at some point).

[@user-wq9mw2xz3j]

Yup. with a 7600x, it can manage 3 speed (its actually 4x simulation speed) at 100k, but not at 140k population. And at 300k population, it cant even handle 1x speed.

[@Steamie0625]

So glad that 2 of my favorite creators have a collab video! Great video Gamer Nexus.

[@MrBlazer688]

The entire CS community thanks you Steve and the entire GN team, this will surely provide CS2 gamers a better experience!

[@Shadow__133]

Yes, this game will certainly increase Counter Strike sales 😂

[@gus_abreu]

Thank so muck for this I asked in one of your videos (and probably other people), and you delivered.

[@nicholaspeterson2615]

When I saw City Planner Plays benchmarks I was hoping GN would give a call out. Happy my hopes came true.

[@HatemEngab]

Bless you all, I really appreciate every detail. You guys making a great efforts and I never saw anyone doing it like you. Without you I will be lost.

[@W00KER]

You guys are the best, no one I know online benchmarks like this, very thorough, very informative.

[@NelielSugiura]

Woot!! I mentioned this collab should happen on CPP's video for the same.... that he does the building and you do the testing. Would have saved money on both sides, I bet. Glad it happened (sorta)!

[@LautaroQ2812]

I am so baffled at the notion that devs made this, in theory tested, and they were like "Yup, seems good to me!". I am very very bittersweet about refunding this, but also don't regret it if that makes sense. And with the refund I couldn't rebuy it, because the price went up for us. So I bought CP77 DLC instead to play some day. If I ever can, I will buy Cities again in 2 years or so, IF my hardware actually gets capable enough to run it. If not, then I'll miss out. (2600, RX 580, 16gb ram). While is not all smooth sailing playing BG3... the game is TOTALLY playable in this machine. Night and day difference.

[@GamersNexus]

Wow! How did the RX 580 do? We didn't test that far back -- was it completely unplayable at lowest?

[@renatosabo4234]

Thank God I didn't purchase I knew they would do wrong again. They should learn from transport fever team

[@LautaroQ2812]

I didn't play it, refunded before even trying it. City Planner tested it and other creators and it was unplayable for what I've seen. According to these people and charts, my hardware couldn't run it at all.@@GamersNexus

[@dimasfazlur5926]

too many crash and bugs, just wait 1 year until theres many dlc and mods, parasox dames is no goos at release, they feel unbeta tested

[@droson8712]

The RX 580 was and even still is such a great value used. ARC A580 is shifting things up at that price range on the new market. Still with games being so unoptimized even the new cards are falling to their knees.

[@enire8477]

It was kind of strange not seeing a 1440 benchmark table, I haven't played anything at 1080 for a little while now.

[@TheKlipski]

3440x1440 medium settings on a 4070ti, I was at 45 fps.

[@arcadeportal32]

​​@@TheKlipskiI was also getting about 45fps my OC Strix RTX 2060 Super. It is not running bad least compared to my modded CS1. Though it is pretty buggy. At 3440x1440

[@63CorvetteStingray]

I'm getting 25fps on my 2070super with 120k population

[@TotalXPvideos]

@TheKlipski 1440p 45 fps medium settings on a 3070, granted that's only just started.

[@adridell]

​@@arcadeportal32 how in hell are you getting 45 fps at 1440p with a 2060? I get 35 fps on an rx 7900xtx, and that gpu was ahead of the rtx 4090 most of the time in this video....

[@unsaltedskies]

We've been needing this honest appraisal of C:S2 given how many reviewers who were given advanced copies were under NDA preventing them from speaking about the game negatively.

[@adorepumpkin]

I like that you are testing builder/RTS games , thx :-)

[@EngiocGames]

Most likely a case of the publisher wanting a release no matter what, even though the developer clearly knew, and was more than likely telling Paradox, that the game wasn't done and needed more time. When will publishers ever learn to stop meddling in game development and give games more time, it's not like they needed to start getting sales, it was already available for people to buy on pre-order. I know some will hold off on buying it till release, but if they buy it and then discover it's an unfinished game you end up losing them anyway with people opting for refunds until it's fixed, so people that would have bought it at full price, now getting a refund and will likely now wait for a sale. Also, I don't know what the rush was for, surely a few extra weeks would have prevented this from happening, and you'd still get it out the door a day or 2 before Christmas, and doing so also means there is no option of a Christmas sale due to the steam policy preventing new titles from being on sale, forcing people to buy it at full price.

[@reclusingrecluse4835]

Because they've seen years of people buying crappy unplayable games at launch. Why would they allow for the devs to actually do their jobs well when they can just release the game, get millions, and just have the devs slowly roll out patches to make the game actually playable. The amount of people that end up getting a refund is most likely a minority compared to people that end up keeping the game hoping it'll become better in the future (ask any person that plays Bethesda games). Welcome to the world of Triple A gaming, publishers do what they do because it's been working for almost if not 10 years now. And it's not like you can know if a game's gonna be shit at launch until it comes out and they've already got your money.

[@lemoncake6957]

Uninstall/Refund. The biggest voice one can have. Devs of the 21st cent need to up their game. All the software & pc hardware N' the 90s shits over everything being released.

[@Joegengstah]

Great coverage for a game I'm looking to get into! My first city builder was Caesar 3 also, it came pre-installed in a Dell PC owned by my friends family, in the year 2000. I basically moved in with them as a result. They still call themselves my "spare parents". I was 10 years old at the time, and have been hooked on the eternal juggle-struggle to satisfy needy inhabitants ever since. As for CS2, its looking like medium settings with fog/blur/DoF/volumetrics off with maybe some higher textures should do the trick for me, to make it playable and still retain some visuals, until more optimizations come in. Thanks for testing!

[@pfeilspitze]

TBH, just play OG cities skylines for a while. Once they release the map editor, the intersection editor, etc, then maybe it'll be out of its current defacto-beta. A few things are better in the new one, but there's nothing worth the price of admission right now. (The first cities skylines was competing against a horrible EA game, but this one is competing against the now-very-good previous game.)

[@matroid10]

Honestly, I take that advice for pretty much every high fidelity game I play. Even with a 16 GB RX6800, sometimes I turn shadows down one or two ticks, and then do all the steps you suggested. Pretty much consumes 90-180 watts above 100 FPS in 2k ultra textures for every modern game. Developers don't know how to optimize s***.

[@lemoncake6957]

Uninstall/Refund. The biggest voice. RTX4080 getting under 60fps @1080 is just unacceptable in 2023.

[@realadamthekid]

THANK YOU SO MUCH for doing this! Was looking to upgrade my graphics card and this helped me make a decision :)

[@Kid15X]

I was expecting performance to be bad, as the first one still struggles to run well even on high end systems but I didn't expect it to be THIS bad, hopefully updates will help

[@MrTechnofuzz]

Please follow this up with a CPU test, i would really like to see how intel vs AMD does in this game, specifically 3D vcache. I know CS1 loves the 3D cache CPUs. Thanks Techno

[@Nickayz2]

Agreed!

[@Kiloku2]

If they can figure out how to get the simulation tick rate, it'd be perfect. A city builder could run at a buttery smooth graphical frame rate but have extremely slow simulation if the CPU can't keep up, making it unplayable.

[@asmi06]

It doesn't matter what cpu you use as the bottleneck is clearly in gpu. I'm so happy I held off buying the game before launch as I play at 1440p and will never go back to 1080p. Hopefully in a few months devs will make it playable on my 3080ti at 1440p.

[@MrTechnofuzz]

@@asmi06 i run 1440p but i have a rtx 3080, so i dont really have a problem, but i cant play it on high or ultra, so i run medium, with 4 things turned off. You cant really tell a difference tbh

[@asmi06]

@MrTechnofuzz wait until you have a 100k pop and then we'll see if you have a problem 😉

[@cakeatnoon2816]

This is the kind of objective empirical analysis only Steve has proven himself consistently capable of. Every GN subscriber was anticipating this in depth review and Steve did not disappoint!

[@insideline158]

IDK though, he uses the presets a ton for comparison through out the video then goes on to say the presets are garbage and don't create a nice performance/quality scale for graphic. If they knew the presets were garbage, I would prefer comparisons between custom settings optimized for performance or quality (or different shades of grey in between those). I know that most casual gamers will just choose a preset for graphics but I would guess the average demographic of this channel would be 100% willing to choose custom optimized settings.

[@kumarsalib722]

Thanks for the incredibly detailed work. I'll definitely be waiting on this game.

[@jesper1010]

Excellent and detailed review Steve! Makes me realize that I either have to buy a new GPU or wait before buying the game. Keep up the good work!

[@ziizoraka4985]

the HUGE fps boost from toggling DoF was only apparent when menuing for me

[@huldu]

Same here. In the menu at high I had 35 fps when everything was set to low/disabled I got 471. This did not reflect at all in the actual game of course. Took a bit of tweaking to reduce settings and turning them off to get a somewhat smooth 60 fps in the game. This video helps a ton rather than random people on reddit or steam.

[@jacobh0]

Appreciate this coverage! Need to keep holding game devs accountable for terrible game optimization, which falls to consumers to need unnecessary upgrades

[@stevenkoppelkam643]

Hoping to see some more care reviews soon, im mentally planning a build but i wanna see how heavy hitters stack up against the new arrivals

[@FuelX]

I have not seen one of your videos in my KZbin feed for months!

[@Nickayz2]

Great review! Are you going to make one for CPUs, too? Including some HEDT Threadrippers so we can see, how well the game really scales CPU-wise?

[@dhillaz]

I love the optimizations and preset comparison chapters, I hope developers use your video as a reference for their fixing strategy.

[@goldgetter900]

Thanks for all the testing you do

[@Schaelpy]

Thanks for supporting him❤

[@Lauscro]

just noticed letters in graphs are bit off, thanks for video as always!

[@IRefuseToUseThisStupidFeature]

The irony of fog being a higher graphics setting (lowering performance somewhat) but also reducing the usefulness of higher quality textures. Fog used to be a setting to reduce draw distance.

[@gigitrix]

Huge difference between fog (ending opaque soon to reduce draw distance required) and fog (alpha blending everywhere)

[@IRefuseToUseThisStupidFeature]

Yes. Though regardless it obscures texture quality making a certain effective maximum texture resolution for the fog covered objects.

[@gokuangry]

Nice and detailed video as always, top notch analysis from Gamers Nexus. I wanted to see some benchmarks with AMD 3D CPU as well, since I have one and I wanted to see if there will be some differences.

[@jamieknight326]

From CPP and Buffa’s data, X3D CPU’s don’t offer much or any performance improvement. I think this makes sense as cache size is still very small compared to the total memory used within CS2. The cache isn’t being hit often enough for the lower latencies of the 3D cache design to help much. If I understand it correctly, the X3D chips show the best performance in games with a tight gameplay loop & minimal state to keep track off. That way a larger proportion of memory requests can come from the cache. Part of my work involves a lot of cache optimisation in financial crime detection software. It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes when the resident dataset goes over the cache size. For our code, it can be a 10x difference in performance and for a game I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a 15-20x difference. Compared to the caches, main memory is painfully slow. Faster DDR5 increases the bandwidth, but still doesn’t get much below 10ns. For a CPU at 5ghz, that’s 10 wasted cycles. Hope that’s a useful answer for your question.

[@OpalMonkey.]

Not really my kind of game, but it's super interesting to see this kind of testing. It also helps vary your content, especially at times like now. While the recent Intel CPU reviews are hilarious, the numbers aren't exactly interesting 😆 Edit: It really does feel like a lot of devs are just shoving their games out the door _knowing_ they're not ready for release anymore. I'd be completely fine with it if they'd just slap an early access label on it so people have some idea that there are going to be issues. But it's sad to see this happen so often in normal releases.

[@lowlygrunt3083]

Thanks, really looking forward to playing this ... in a few years

[@MinecrafterPiano]

Hey GN, love the work you do! The bg noise seems to pitch-up intermittently through the video (most noticeable at 4:26, 4:35, 7:16-7:21). Super minor and not distracting; I'm mostly just curious as to why it's there. Hell, it may be an artifact of transcoding. Thanks for the card comparison! Looks like I'm going to hold off buying until they do a few more QC passes!

[@wile123456]

Despite the games flaws I appreciate the advanced option menu. You can tweak every setting in detail which allows you to really optimized. For example you can make post process effect like dof or AO run at lower resolution than native, giving a big boost at no visual cost. It sadly isn't the deafult only at the low preset. But you could use the high AO setting, turn of fullscreen effect and get most of the performance from low but without the visual cutbacks

[@matroid10]

I have always noticed that aside from ultra shadows and ray tracing, post-processing effects are often the most GPU hungry and FPS killing options. Good rule of thumb to just never use depth of field. It's hard for me to live without ambient occlusion though. Lol

[@intoxicode]

I just really can't wrap my head around why games since like 2019 have been public beta tests.. Like why does every game company feel the need to just get the product done and then submit the public to the actual testing of the product, and addressing of issues and bugs. Is it stockholder pressure? Funding deadlines?

[@DysClaimer]

Great video. I’m toying with buying a new machine so I can play this game, and this is a lot of help!

[@N3xusSolo]

Thank you for this analyze! 🙏

[@JJLGamingNL]

This is exactly what I was looking for. Clear, precise, and full of good tips on how to improve performance. I have a 3060 Ti and I'm very surprised that a graphics card that is only 3 years old and still costs somewhere around €500 today is struggling this much with a city builder. All devs should test their games extensively for the hardware that their buyers have, not for the best hardware available in the market. It's just common sense.

[@csoc24]

I also just got my first setup, 3060ti and now I’m really regretting it, feels like it’s just immediately going to get outpaced. Guess I’ll play most current ish games for a while until these games get some patches

[@lemoncake6957]

@@csoc24 If devs cannot be bothered to do basic optimization then why should we wait N' give them the chance? Uninstall/Refund is the best voice.

[@Jalex0021]

@@lemoncake6957 ​ But the developers, Colossal Order, do not control the date of release, the publisher, Paradox Interactive does. No doubt the developers are deeply frustrated that the work they've put in up to now is being undermined like this. I know I would be.

[@squidwardo7074]

@@csoc24 It definitely won't just because they released some unoptimized games. I also get about 60-70fps in this game at 1440p with a regular 3060 so these tests don't tell the full story at least for most people

[@Reaga85]

I'm really enjoying the recent in depth looks into specific games, and the setting by setting variance. So thanks for the info on these. With CS:2 I'm curious how CPU performance affects the game. Simulation games are often pretty CPU heavy, but is the graphical limitations making any CPU difference meaningless in this title? Or is there just as much variance when comparing CPUs in the title as with GPUs?

[@dumdumbinks274]

Seems like the simulation is almost completely separate to the graphics so they don't really affect each other. FPS seems to flatten out while still playable, meanwhile the simulation speed just gets slower and slower the more population increases. The fastest CPUs seem to be capable of up to around 400K population, while a more average or last gen CPU will get maybe 330K population before grinding to a halt.

[@TheExilium]

hey i was happy that my 1080ti was in the chart and was abselut blown that you testet old card when i saw that you chose 1080ti to test in depth XD really happy :=)

[@poida84]

great video, i been having great time playing CS2 one setting i did change i don't think mentioned in video is AA to use TAA instead of SMAA the edges look way better esp when high texture or shadows.. do you think you can do a CPU benchmark? i hit the pop cap of 180k on Ryzen 7600x when even at time speed at 1x the simulation lot slower. the FPS still pretty good avg 28-35 with my 6800XT though...

[@carpelunam]

Normally youd find comments below telling people how their poor or the game is just next gen, but Steve's analysis is so on point and in depth theres no argument to be had. lol Its like clockwork on game releases at this point just like the optimization updates that come a month or two later from launch.

[@eggsdooley]

It’s somehow unsurprising that Steve loves games about building things and analysing data.

[@cklotter]

Huge fan of your channel and CS1 is my most played game, thanks for this benchmark!

[@InsaneFirebat]

I like seeing the benchmarks for individual settings. Tuning that stuff can feel like such a waste of time when you don't know what's worth experimenting with.

[@ash36230]

Level of Depth is an interesting setting, because having that on high tanks my framerate, even in a menu. Setting it to low gives me a very playable 30fps in game 🙃 I imagine the devs knew the game wasn't quite ready for release and yet were pushed to release it on time

[@Tetragramix]

Level of Detail

[@doltBmB]

the big issue seems to be a lack of proper sorting and instancing, since LOD and shadows both have such a massive impact, remember that shadows work by rendering the city a second time from the suns perspective. also it seems that shadows always have some kind of distance filtering on them, which is usually insanely expensive, it would be nice if that effect could be toggled separately from the shadows.

[@last8exile]

Cascade shadows require one additional render pass and result buffer for each cascade. Mixing done in shaders without notable costs.

[@rafalbroncel5792]

Thanks for comparison. It would be great to see some update on it specially with latest patch in 2024.

[@pjones2303]

Thanks for your work on this it’s appreciated 👍

[@sky173]

I'm SO glad I haven't purchased this yet. I thought about it considering how bad FPS gets with the first version. I'll definitely be waiting a while.

[@pfeilspitze]

The gameplay's just not really there yet either, compared to the first version. I'd say wait until at least they actually include the map editor; maybe that'll be a good indicator that it's actually not in Early Access (effectively) any more. Right now, the first version is still better.

[@gamebuster800]

They could have created a copy of CS1 with improved performance and I'd pay 80$ for it. This seems like the opposite direction for me. I don't care about any new features if the performance is worse than CS1.

[@thesteelrodent1796]

there are a few performance mods for CS1 that makes it run significantly better, like FPS boosters and others that hide stuff you can't see anyway unless you're zoomed all the way in. I've got like 20-30 GB of mods and assets for CS1 and still achieve well above 30 fps on average thanks to the booster mods, while on CS2 I cannot get it to maintain a stable 30 fps even on a new city with zero traffic, and as soon as the weather changes in CS2, the FPS just dies and there's no way to adjust the quality of the weather effects or even turn them off. Definitely hold off a few months or more till they've made a proper attempt at fixing the FPS

[@Serew9]

As a fan of the first Cities (one of my favourite games), I have bought it on premiere and... I have refunded it. The ammount of bugs, graphics from 2005, lack of mods... it just made me sad. You could actually see, what DLC they will prepare :/

[@benjaminreynolds3659]

I'm enjoying the game immensely and I am using an Arc a770 LE and there is a new beta driver for the GPU. On mixed gfx setting, mostly medium, but some high at 1080p with CPP's 100k city save game I am getting 35 FPS on average.

[@LlywellynOBrien]

Really good to know, I am planning on buying a 770 soon and wanted to know whether it was running. It seems it only gets coverage when it is way below the crowd.

[@mademedothis424]

Reposting standalone from a response elsewhere in case it helps anybody. There are options for lowering the resolution of screen space effects there that do a LOT for performance but don't seem to be engaged on any of the standard presets, or at least to not line up with the performance uptick from other advanced settings like raycasting density or sample count. I was able to go from that same 40fps at 1080p on a 4090 to fairly consistent 60-80fps at 1440p ultrawide (which did scale down to about 55-ish average as the city grew). There is also a TAA antialiasing mode that looks better than any other option but does not correlate to any preset unless manually toggled under the advanced menu. It's not just that some of the settings are broken and some of the settings are disproportionately heavy, changing their "high/medium/low" toggles just doesn't change what it should change, even at the individual setting level. The game doesn't runn well no matter what, but it can be made to reach some semblance of a compromise between resolution, visual quality and performance... at the cost of basically retuning the whole thing. At least they give you a menu for that instead of just ini files.

[@luizarthurbrito]

Hey GN. This game is also perfect for a cpu scaling benchmark! I notice my cpu constantly being 90% - 95% utilized while on 3x speed in a 100k pop city.

[@lkp7481]

I had blinking shadows and game looked horrible almost unbearable with shadows on. I saw a post about using TAA under advanced settings in regards anti aliasing and it stopped the blinking shadows and improved FPS by about 8 for me and made everything look better.

[@peterkazmir]

Any chance we can get some benchmarks regarding the effect of the CPU being used? Does X3D help at all, for example?

[@duckrutt]

City Planner Plays did CPU (and GPU) testing but it was a week ago and I don't remember how it shook out I don't know if I can leave links here or if it'll spam filter me so to be safe the video is wyNiXYC9eoM

[@NinjaQuick]

disabling DOF and setting to static resolution, and ONLY disabling DOF and setting static resolution took me from 9fps to 45fps. A great video sullied by a bad bit of data.

[@moncyn1]

4:44 rimworld also slows down a lot when you have old advanced colony, you should add rimworld as good single threaded game for your performance suits

[@Arthur-jx8bm]

Runs really well for me after a few tweaks on a 7800XT at 1440p. Very happy and enjoying the game!

[@slayerr4365]

Love when devs introduce performance optimisation literally days or even hours after release. Really makes you wonder why it never crossed their mind to do it in the years of development lol.

[@ollehkacb]

Cheaper to have customers beta test, than pay people to do so.

[@jorgeaugusto6076]

They did, 'til we discovered they didn't. They changed specs 1 week before release and literally said "We can't meet perfomance standards, but we will launch it anyway!"

[@FUnzzies1]

Because they get critical data after release that allows for sub optimizations you can't do during development.

[@coasterfreak0471]

Because they didn’t have years of development for it. Everything up until announcement in March was super early foundation stuff. The June gameplay trailer was the first REAL sense that they had something going. I was surprised they even had a launch date of this year, since we’d notice the issues with it running decently even on expensive hardware. But we can most likely assume it was the people above them who forced them to push it for this year rather than delay. Developers had to do what they could in such short time to put something “playable” for people and then fix it over time. While this isn’t confirmed, I can only imagine how stressed devs are even up to today with how many things are broken and not working as intended. I will say that the hatred towards others who have stable experiences should be addressed and criticized because not everyone will experience the same things as those who just so happen to speak up louder. I’ve had a really good time with the game so far, even though it’s fairly upper-end hardware (RX 6800 and Ryzen 5600X). There were SEVERAL performance improvements right before launch day, and further optimizations are coming soon, as they’ve already stated both on Steam and in their forums. I have no doubt that things will be MUCH better in a short period of time.

[@slayerr4365]

@@FUnzzies1 If only there was a certain job that developers used to give people to test games before release... If only right. Oops my bad that also requires spending money so we can't expect that from companies anymore.

[@ojonathan]

Would be amazing to see CPU scaling in a follow-up/revisit. Recent patches really improved frame rates and they'll drop the last patch of the year in the next weeks. At 200k-300k population, the CPU gets hammered really hard in this game. C:S2 Discord has a bunch of maps with different population count, the most interesting one is a 1 million population map, which even with all but essential/public transportation vehicles removed through the developer GUI, only runs at 0.1 to 0.3 simulation speed on a 5900X, the 2x/4x/8x (the latter is only available on photo mode or dev UI) multiplier has not effect whatsoever. For reference, a regular simulation speed of an empty map is 1.0, and the game features simulation speed compensation through interpolation, and not even that is enough to compensate for the slow sim speed (since interpolation itself has a hard limitation because of its drawbacks).

[@teganburgess]

Turning on TAA (Anti-Aliasing) @ 1080p or 1440p then chang the settings from there. TAA gets rid of so much shimmering and jagged lines that it looks sharper than it is at lower resolution. DynRes Custom ; using AMD FSR 1.0 80% Adapt Off, these helped a bit. Some weird smearing from moving objets with FSR but its using 1.0 so you get what you get. Thanks for the video!

[@Luna5ama]

Would be good the see benchmarks on even higher population city, like 200k or more.

[@dyzzyize]

I will just play it later on. One thing is I don't have a GPU that can play it even in low settings and even the GPUs I plan on buying will just disappoint me if the current trend is the case. (was hoping to at least enjoy it at 1440p low-medium settings @ 30fps)

[@phoenix7289]

I would just like to say thanks for covering this! And any plans for follow ups to this?

[@englishcrusade]

Pre-patch I saw 40fps with depth of field and motion blur on but if I disabled I got over 60fps. Post patch I don’t see that any more. I agree something else under the hood is happening but it was very true disabling these settings made a significant impact on performance

[@zerophoenix6758]

I have a feeling that a lot of the optimisation came in the form of making the "cims" take as little CPU time as possible but next to nothing for GPU load. If it were possible I think just testing City complexity in the form of number of structures or total entities might reveal that. (Realistically no one's going to build a massive City with literally no population so it's not exactly a fair test but would be interesting) Ive built a city of about 240,000 cims in cs1, and without a mod that optimises some of the GPU usage that would flat out be impossible, still ever with it my poor CPU was struggling. Given the metrics provided here if I tried that now in cs2, my pc might explode xD

[@Yonkage-ik5qb]

The agent system was a mistake from the very beginning. It results in tons of stupid behavior like a huge traffic rush after building new residential because all the new people literally have to physically "move in" to the city all at the same time. It was also the reason why you needed mods to unlock all the tiles in CS1; vanilla locked it at a certain amount to hide the fatal flaw with the agent system. The fact is, over a certain population you hit a hard cap of the agents and the entire city will collapse. As I recall it was less that 300K which is very small for a city sim (but then, Skylines was always and remains a builder for compact "toybox cities" rather than ones which realistically sprawl). Now for 2 they've said that there is no agent limit anymore, but that probably won't matter. The simple reality is that rather than the linear growth of computations needed for a representative system (like old SimCity games had) an agent system will have EXPONENTIAL growth of computations, as each new agent added to the system will have to calculate interactions with every other agent. Not that it seems to matter what the CPU does if the best GPUs on the market can't handle 100K population.

[@user-wq9mw2xz3j]

Nope, cims have very little performance hit on the gpu. Can remove them with the dev console or just place a lot of buildings with cheats with no population.

[@jamieknight326]

I think CPP observed some paradoxical scaling on population size. As the population grew the total number of buildings went down as single large buildings replaced smaller buildings. The scaling is going to depend a bit on city layout and lot sizing. The CIMs themselves don’t appear to carry much overheard. If I had to guess the state tracking for CIMs is done using matrix instructions via the CPU SIMD extensions or GPU compute. In those scenarios updating 512 values takes the exact same amount of time as updating 1. The game is fascinating from a performance perspective. I hope they release more info on the inner workings in the future. It would be a really compelling way to explain computer science concepts.

[@user-wq9mw2xz3j]

yes this. HOW the city is expanded matters greatly. If you increase child chance and zone only high density, you can get 200k population without lag, whereas if you do it with lower child chance and only low residential, 100k might lag.@@jamieknight326

[@TrackmaniaKaiser]

@@jamieknight326 Do you think CIMs tracking via GPU compute could be a puzzle piece to the bad performance as the simulation runs partly on the gpu and therefore "stealing" ressources from the frame computation itself?

[@edplat2367]

We went from game devs releasing beta software to this year where they decide to release games in the alpha stage.

[@thesteelrodent1796]

it was the same thing in 2010-2014. It all goes in cycles. But CO actually manage to make a game that runs worse than Arkham Knight, which is quite an achievement

[@regularjmg]

I have been waiting for this 🙌🏽