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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#341

Post by Dah00n »

alkonaut wrote: post #327

Making a AAA game sounds horrible. And making one in Unity sounds doubly so. All of these things sound like fixable issues. They'll likely be fixed. Hopefully the developers made these oversights because they focused on what makes the game worth fixing to begin with: that the gameplay is fun. In many recent games I feel developers have focused on the wrong things and totally forgot the core, meaning if they fix the b…

>Someone has said "it's ok to be just 10fps on beefy hardware, we can fix that later, let's ship it now".

Well, yes, because it doesn't matter. It is on the top seller list on Steam. I agree with you, but we can discuss fixes till our fingers bleed. In the end, the problem is capitalism.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=english...

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#342

Post by wilg »

thrillgore wrote: post #246

"And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution because Colossal Order had to implement quite a lot of the graphics side themselves because Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and arguably unsuitable for most actual games." This sadly tracks with my own experiences with Unity's tooling, where DOTS did ship but its i…

DOTS is homegrown isn’t it?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#343

Post by iMerNibor »

frogblast wrote: post #335
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…

> Maybe they could have gotten away with this with UE5's Nanite

Exactly.

If unity actually delivered a workable graphics pipeline (for the DOTS/ECS stack, or at all keeping up with what UE seems to be doing) these things probably wouldn't be an issue.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#344

Post by Retric »

mvdtnz wrote: post #336
Retric wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s speculation based on these mesh sizes being so arbitrary in the game development process and what’s broken being unnecessarily window dressing for gameplay. It’s the kind of thing that could be delayed to the last minute with some simple placeholder.

“Now you might say that these are just cherry-picked examples, and that modern hardware handles models like these just fine. And you would be broadly correct in that, but the problem is that all of these relatively small costs start to add up, especially in a city builder where one unoptimized model might get rendered a few hundred times in a single frame. Rasterizing tens of thousands of polygons per instance per frame and literally not affecting a single pixel is just wasteful, whether or not the hardware can handle it. The issues are luckily quite easy to fix, both by creating more LOD variants and by improving the culling system. It will take some time though, and it remains to be seen if CO and Paradox want to invest that time, especially if it involves going through most of the game’s assets and fixing them one by one.”

IE: The the game would have looked nearly complete even if none of these meshes where in use. Meanwhile the buildings themselves are optimized.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#345

Post by Dah00n »

bhaak wrote: post #78

Is there any Paradox game that doesn’t have lots of obvious bugs and terrible UI at release? And only the former gets somewhat addressed over time. I really wonder how they develop at that place. And what kind of QS they have.I think even applying a crude pareto would improve their games a lot. Edit: I stand corrected. I wasn't aware that Paradox is also a publisher and even such a big company (over 600 employees!).…

>Still makes you wonder how they go about their business

In a way that sent them straight to the top sellers list on Steam. Sadly, today, it just doesn't matter.

Edit: spelling

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#346

Post by frogblast »

iMerNibor wrote: post #343
frogblast wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Maybe they could have gotten away with this with UE5's Nanite Exactly. If unity actually delivered a workable graphics pipeline (for the DOTS/ECS stack, or at all keeping up with what UE seems to be doing) these things probably wouldn't be an issue.

DOTS/ECS has nothing to do with geometry LODs. Those are purely optimizing CPU systems.

Even if DOTS was perfect, the GPU would still be entirely geometry throughput bottlenecked.

Yes, UE5 has a large competitive advantage today for high-geometry content. But that wasn’t something Unity claimed could be automatically solved (so Unity is in the same position as every other engine in existence apart from UE5).

The developer should have been aware from the beginning of the need for geometry LOD: it is a city building game! The entire point is to position the camera far away from a massive number of objects!

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#347

Post by Dah00n »

jrajav wrote: post #68
hypeatei wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve/Steam should really have some policies around unfinished or unpolished games so that they are forced to be marked as "early access" It is absolutely ridiculous that these developers can get away with releasing a beta (essentially what it is) and setting the full release price without the end user knowing they're a guinea pig.

Read the reviews and don't buy it. This works fantastically as a punishment already without ham-handed, opaque moderation.

If this works fantastically, then why is it at the top sellers list?

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=english...

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#348

Post by paavohtl »

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.

Author here: I never bothered counting the total vertices used per frame because I couldn't figure out an easy way to do it in Renderdoc. However someone on Reddit measured the total vertex count with ReShade and it can apparently reach hundreds of millions and up to 1 billion vertices in closeups in large cities.

Edit: Checked the vert & poly counts with Renderdoc. The example scene in the article processes 121 million vertices and over 40 million triangles.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#349

Post by Dah00n »

wincy wrote: post #205
solardev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their reviews are punishment enough. "Very Positive" for CS:1 and "Mixed" for CS:2. And if it improves over time, the reviews improve with them! Cyberpunk was a good example of that. And the graphs make it really easy to see how it's changed over time: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1091500/Cyberpunk_2077/#a...

Okay for real, who decided this game could be have the acronym CS? Counterstrike has been one of the most played games since 2000. I don’t even play Counterstrike but it has a huge player base compared to this game. And didn’t Counterstrike 2 literally come out a few weeks ago?

To make matters worse when it just released, the two top games on Steam were CS:2 and CS:2.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#350

Post by deanCommie »

inoffensivename wrote: post #7

I spent 40 minutes trying to eke out more than a handful of fps on an empty map with the resolution set at 1080p with Proton Experimental. I gave up and got a refund, I'll try again if they fix the awful performance. I got a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of the first instalment of the game, it's a big bummer that I can't give this one a go

The fix fits into a tweet -> https://twitter.com/ColossalOrder/status/1716883884724322795

> If you're having issues with performance, we recommend you reduce screen resolution to 1080p, disable Depth of Field and Volumetrics, and reduce Global Illumination while we work on solving the issues affecting performance.

This is all I had to do to get smooth performance on an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT

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