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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#331

Post by jsnell »

perihelions wrote: post #237
make3 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it should be illegal imho. You straight up shouldn't be allowed to tell reviewers what they can and can't review

Strong agree. It should be core FTC rulemaking to prohibit this; it's a form of advertisement masquerading as independent review. (If the subject of the review sets conditions on its content, to restrain the reviewer from discussing their negative observations, it has the character of an advertisement. The subject is enforcing editorial control; thus, they have partial authorship/editorship of their own "review". Eit…

What's being described isn't an example of conditions being set on the content of the review. It's an embargo date on when a review may be released, and a restriction of what may be publicly disclosed before the review is published.

There's nothing wrong about that, and in fact forbidding embargo dates would have a pretty bad outcome. It would result in reviewers getting no early review copies, and having to rush out shoddy reviews ASAP after the release. Likewise the customers would have no access to reviews on the release date, and would either need to wait or buy the game blindly.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#332

Post by Retric »

mvdtnz wrote: post #322
clnq wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is one of the 1,000,000 things to pay attention to in game development. Someone or some software probably just made a mistake in setting up its LOD. Or some dynamic LODding code didn't properly cull the LOD0 mesh. Or that code couldn't be finished in time. Or it was something else. It's completely normal in AAA games to have a few imperfect and in-optimal things. Budgets are always limiting, and developmen…

> It's completely normal in AAA games to have a few imperfect and in-optimal things. No, mate, stop. The state of C:S2 is well beyond anything we should accept as "completely normal". It's a defective product that should not have been released. Stop normalising this crap.

Their point is that specific mesh could be left alone and the game still be playable as long as other issues were fixed.

Chances are a nearly complete version of C:S2 was playable and they “broke it” at the last minute by not finishing the optimization process.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#333

Post by [deleted] »

hellotomyrars wrote: post #310
MrLeap wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally been responsible for optimizing unity games you haven't heard issues like this about ;) This write-up really points the finger at not solving occlusion culling or having good LOD discipline. Give a person a dedicated optimization mandate and you can avoid most of this. One of the first things I do when I'm profiling is to sort assets by tris count and scan for excess. I wonder if they had somebody g…

Yeah I mean regardless of any of Unity’s limitations, this is entirely upon the developer. However, I also find the suggestion that because there are other high profile examples of unity projects with performance issues, it must be a problem with unity. You don’t hear that about Unreal Engine, despite the fact that there are poorly optimized UE games. Such a bizarre set of assumptions.

[deleted]

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#334

Post by ReactiveJelly »

olaulaja wrote: post #235

For a bit of reference, a full frame of Crysis (benchmark scene) was around 300k vertices or triangles (memory is fuzzy), so 3-10 log piles depending on which way my memory is off and how bad the vertex/triangle ratio is in each.

Sounds right. I remember seeing "1M Triangles" in the performance HUD and thinking, that's crazy, a million triangles. Probably very few shared vertices once you account for edge splits, billboards, etc.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#335

Post by frogblast »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #227

DOTS is the brain child of Mike Action. See his 2014 CppCon "Data-Oriented Design and C++" [1]. But Mike has left Unity, according to his twitter. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

Despite the original post talking about DOTS rough edges, I didn't see anything in that article that actually suggested DOTS was the cause: that would cause CPU overhead, but it seems like they simply have a bunch of massively over-detailed geometry, and never implemented any LOD system.

Maybe they could have gotten away with this with UE5's Nanite, but that much excessive geometry would have brought everything else to its knees.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#336

Post by mvdtnz »

Retric wrote: post #332
mvdtnz wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's completely normal in AAA games to have a few imperfect and in-optimal things. No, mate, stop. The state of C:S2 is well beyond anything we should accept as "completely normal". It's a defective product that should not have been released. Stop normalising this crap.

Their point is that specific mesh could be left alone and the game still be playable as long as other issues were fixed. Chances are a nearly complete version of C:S2 was playable and they “broke it” at the last minute by not finishing the optimization process.

That's speculation based on nothing but vibes.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#337

Post by KronisLV »

mardifoufs wrote: post #313
KronisLV wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, automatic LOD generation would solve at least some of the performance issues: add the functionality, make it opt-out for those that don't need LODs and enjoy performance improvements in most projects, in addition to some folks getting a simpler workflow (e.g. using auto-generated models instead of having to create your own, which could at the very least have passable quality). Godot has this: https://docs.g…

I'm pretty sure unity already has that.

Out of the box, it only has manual LOD support for meshes: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/importing-lod-meshes.html (where you create the models yourself)

They played around with the idea of automatic LOD, but the repo they had hasn't gotten updated in a while: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AutoLOD

The closest to that would be looking at assets on the Asset Store, for example: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/poly-f...

An exception to that is something like the terrain, which generates the model on the fly and decreases detail for further away chunks as necessary, but that's pretty much the same with the other engines (except for Godot, which doesn't have a terrain solution built in, but the terrain plugins do have that functionality). I guess in Unity's case you can still get that functionality with bought assets, which won't be an issue for most studios (provided that the assets get updated and aren't a liability in that way), but might be for someone who just wants that functionality for free.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#338

Post by wilg »

mardifoufs wrote: post #313
KronisLV wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, automatic LOD generation would solve at least some of the performance issues: add the functionality, make it opt-out for those that don't need LODs and enjoy performance improvements in most projects, in addition to some folks getting a simpler workflow (e.g. using auto-generated models instead of having to create your own, which could at the very least have passable quality). Godot has this: https://docs.g…

I'm pretty sure unity already has that.

It doesn’t which is really annoying.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#339

Post by CountHackulus »

capableweb wrote: post #186
lamontcg wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100,000 vertices for pile of logs isn't really a bad bet on tech, though. That is just piling vastly more onto any tech stack than it can handle, with nobody having the time or the political okay to do a perf pass through the code and put all these ideas on a diet. But that means that everything is solvable. There's no need in this game for 100,000 vertices for a logpile, so that should be a relatively straightforwar…

> 100,000 vertices for pile of logs isn't really a bad bet on tech, though. That is just piling vastly more onto any tech stack than it can handle, with nobody having the time or the political okay to do a perf pass through the code and put all these ideas on a diet. I can easily see this happening though. Artist starts making assets, asks "What's my budget for each model" and engineering/managers reply with "Do what…

That sounds like exactly what happened. I've been in that position many times in games I've worked on and seen it happen.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#340

Post by sundvor »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #196
theNJR wrote: post #139

While the complaints about performance are valid, I’m still having a blast with the game. Having an 11 month old means it’s hard to go deep into something like Cyberpunk since I only get short gaming bursts (ie 7:30 when she goes to bed until 8:30 when I turn off screens). Not enough to play a deep narrative game but plenty of time to expand out my industrial area, fix a highway interchange and figure out what’s goin…

The complaints are valid to some extent, but also overblown too. People complaining that 30-50 FPS is unplayable need to get some perspective on what is and is not playable. And even the article here drops some hot hyperbole when it says that the game runs worse than CP2077 with max settings and path tracing. I've run (tried to run) CP in such a configuration, and I get framerates in the teens . By contrast I haven't…

I just got CP2077 along with a new system, where I experience frame rates regularly north of 150 - almost always north of 100 with PBR, everything maxed out. It runs incredibly smooth 100% of the time, and looks completely stunning on my 32" 2560x1440x144 monitor. Specs are 4090/7800x3d, 64gb 6000c30, 990 pro nvme, bought mostly for being able to run DCS World (and iRacing) on triple screens plus Star Citizen. The 4090 is beast, and absolutely worth it.

I haven't had time or perhaps motivation to load up CS2 much, with that superb Cyberpunk story to be explored (and planes to fly), but on the initial tutorial I noticed a weirdly low fps for what was not a super impressive image.

I installed Skylines 2 through my gamepass; my initial thoughts were to come back after some post release patch cycles.

It took the CP2077 team a lot of time but they completely turned a trainwreck into something rather magic, so I'm hoping Skylines 2 will experience the same. I did enjoy the original release years ago. (Edit: Gamers Nexus' video led me to City Planner Plays, which shows just what can be made - the scope of Skylines 2 looks amazing, given my hardware I could probably get into it sooner rather than later!)

Finally a kudos to the author for this in depth, well written article! I really enjoyed it.

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