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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

blog.paavo.me

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#351

Post by kristianp »

honkycat wrote: post #267

Unity has been stalling on it's DOTS and network stack re-implementation for like 5 years now. There is no excuse other than leadership are cashing the checks and squeezing the juice out of the company until they close it, which would make sense looking at their semi-recent merger and poor behavior by the CEO. Seriously, I was looking into Unity at the start of Covid while laid off, and DOTS was "around the corner" e…

When reading sections of the article about Unity's permanently experimental features, I was wondering why they didn't use a different engine (probably because their expertise is in Unity). Does Unreal for example have support for this kind of game?

Oh and I have to mention the cascaded shadow mapping: "taking about 40 milliseconds or almost half of total frametime. ". - 40ms is 25fps all by itself!

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#352

Post by baazaa »

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…

The author's point is that poor support for DOTS meant the devs had to roll their own culling implementation which they screwed up.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#353

Post by iMerNibor »

frogblast wrote: post #346
iMerNibor wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 deve…

To quote from the blog post:

> Unity has a package called Entities Graphics, but surprisingly Cities: Skylines 2 doesn’t seem to use that. The reason might be its relative immaturity and its limited set of supported rendering features

I'd hazard a guess their implementation of whatever bridge between ECS and rendering is not capable of LODs currently (for whatever reason). I doubt they simply forgot to slap on the standard Unity component for LODs during development, there's got to be a bigger roadblock here

Edit: The non-presence of lod'ed models in the build does not necessarily mean they don't exist. Unity builds will usually not include assets that aren't referenced, so they may well exists, just waiting to be used.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#354

Post by mjrpes »

capableweb wrote: post #152
jsyang00 wrote: post #98

Perf issues also basically killed the SimCity franchise on PC. Hope they are able to fix things up

That's a huge misrepresentation of what happened to SimCity. EA released a incredibly user-hostile version of SimCity (always online, microtransations and more) that almost no one liked, and Cities: Skylines was released around that time too.

The main reason I never purchased was the tiny map size. You could barely fit a neighborhood: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/19nz93/sim_city_5_2...

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#355

Post by qwytw »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #261
butz wrote: post #242

Now imagine performance, if this game could be written by a single person in assembly...

Without the stupidly implemented front end draining the resources you could easily have millions of people in your city.

Why do you think the UI is causing all the performance issues?

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#356

Post by Dah00n »

solardev wrote: post #262
worldsayshi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if releasing a widely anticipated game unfinished is sometimes actually strategically beneficial marketing wise. Perhaps it's a marketing dark pattern? It makes the game stay in people's minds longer because people keep coming back to it asking "is it good yet, have they fixed it yet?". It kind of feels it has worked like that for Cyberpunk. If it's a finished game on launch day people will quickly make up t…

I think Cyberpunk was only able to turn itself around because the studio got so famous with The Witcher and people were willing to give them another chance. If they hadn't been famous already, it'd just have been another rando shitty game on Steam, of which there are thousands... But then there are stories No Man's Sky too, which had a miraculous turnaround as well. So maybe it can happen sometimes...

I have a more conspiratorial opinion of Cyberpunks criticism. If you look at Cities Skylines 2 and many other AAA titles, they are just as bad or worse. Yet, the one company that sought to fight the way other developers and publishers behaved got a shitload of criticism for what was - in my opinion - a much smaller problem. CS:2 is much worse, Starfield is way more buggy, etc.

In my opinion, Cyberpunk was punked by the gaming industry to harm CD Project Red. I have no proof at all, of course.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#357

Post by jameshart »

vGPU wrote: post #102

> This mesh of a pile of logs is similarly only used in the shadow rendering pass, and features over 100K vertices. But… why?

Well, because when you’re modeling a pile of logs, each additional log you add doubles the number of vertices.

This is a well known property of log scaling.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#358

Post by vkou »

asylteltine wrote: post #170
jsyang00 wrote: post #98

Perf issues also basically killed the SimCity franchise on PC. Hope they are able to fix things up

Drm killed simcity

If SimCity was good, gamers would have held their nose, and played it, DRM or not, just like they did with a million other DRM-heavy AAA titles.

It wasn't.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#359

Post by taneq »

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.

What trade off would you choose between fixing a performance issue which is somewhat avoidable and fixing a game breaking crash bug? Because the latter gets priority and there’s never enough time to fix all of those before launch, let alone work your way up to closing out every last frame rate drop.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#360

Post by Dah00n »

paavohtl wrote: post #305
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The CP2077 comparison is not hyperbole - it is literally how badly this game performs (or at least performed on launch) on top-tier gaming hardware (namely RTX 4090). I linked a source with the quote.

>The CP2077 comparison is not hyperbole

Except it was hyperbole how Cyberpunk was criticised. Or it wasn't, but it was no worse than most other AAA game, but somehow not all publishers/developers are criticised equally. I completed Cyberpunk and had to reload once because of a bug. That is already much better than Starfield (and every other Bethesda game) and the performance was just fine on my old PC. Something about Cyberpunks massive criticism smells funny.

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