this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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I don't really understand how people make the review threads, but we're sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it's even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the performance issues, but they really are that bad.

  • Popular Cities: Skylines 1 streamers are reporting that they are not able to achieve a consistent 60 fps, even with RTX 4090s and lowering the graphics to 1440p medium settings. Based on utilization numbers, it sounds like the GPU is limiting factor here.
  • Those same streamers are also reporting 16GB of RAM usage when loading up a new map, which means that the minimum recommended spec of 8GB was a blatant lie from the devs.
  • IGN and other reviewers are reporting that the game does not self-level building plots, which is something that C:S1 did pretty well. This leads to every plot looking like this:

this

Maybe not a big deal to some, but the focus of Cities: Skylines has always been on building beautiful cities (vs. having a realistic simulation), so this feels like a betrayal of Colossal Order's own design philosophy.

Personally, this is a pretty big bummer for me. I like C:S1 a lot, but I find it hard to get into a gameflow that feels good unless I commit to mods pretty hard, and that means a steeper learning curve. For this reason, I tend to have more fun just watching other people play the game. I was looking forward to C:S2 as a great jumping on point to really dig into city-building myself. Maybe I'm being too harsh here because of my personal disappointment - many don't really care about hitting 60fps, but those same people also tend to not build top-end PCs. And it sounds like if you don't have a top-end PC, you're looking at sub 30 fps, and I think most agree that that is borderline unplayable.

Anyone else have thoughts on this one?

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[–] DonPiano@feddit.de 50 points 1 year ago (4 children)

There's many things I can overlook here but the lack of bikes nixed my hype fully. I don't want to build car hell yet again. I can leave the house if I wanna see that.

[–] tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No bikes??? I hadn't heard that, one of the most satisfying things about playing C:S1 to me was making great bike routes and useful public transit, without bikes I really don't feel a drive to play this one now honestly hah. Maybe they are going the Sims route where all the useful basic things they added in the previous edition will be released over time as DLC, ffs.

[–] Chobbes 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't think the first Cities Skylines shipped with bikes either? Wasn't it part of the After Dark DLC? Or maybe that was just bike lanes? I hate the DLC for Paradox games... It's so confusing that I think I'm just not going to buy their games anymore.

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[–] RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you're not making your city a hell for the npcs in some way how are you having fun

[–] DonPiano@feddit.de 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean.. If I want to build a hell, I still want options.

Like, realistic space use for car hell would be interesting but maybe sometimes I wanna build a university on a hill and student housing at the top of a different hill and to get to class you have to bike up a hill both ways.

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[–] brezelradar@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago

I don’t want to build car hell yet again

this, so much

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[–] saigot@lemmy.ca 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Those same streamers are also reporting 16GB of RAM usage when loading up a new map, which means that the minimum recommended spec of 8GB was a blatant lie from the devs.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the case, but just because a game uses 16gb of ram on a 32gb system does not been it can't make do with 8gb on a more limited system.

[–] cnnrduncan 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah IMO it's far better for games like Cities Skylines to use as much RAM as they can - especially once mods start coming out! I've had times where my heavily modded version of CS1 wanted 16+ gb of memory because loading assets from RAM is way faster than loading from SSD/HDD!

[–] YMS@kbin.social 47 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Not having 60 fps might be an issue for a shooter or anything that is built on fast reactions, but it doesn't really sound like an issue in a city builder.

[–] ReversalHatchery 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't get much FPS on CS 1, and it's not pleasant. It's probably somewhere between 20-30. But the news above mean that I shouldn't even dream about running CS 2 with this hardware, because it runs much worse than the first game, but also compared to other games.

Honestly I was expecting that CS 2 would run better than 1. I have a little hope that they will fix their shit, but now I don't expect significant improvements over the first game's performance.

[–] TigrisMorte@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"with this hardware", found your problem.

[–] theangriestbird 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yep we better all go drop $3k on a new computer so we can get this game to playable fps!

[–] TigrisMorte@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

So, exactly as every other resource intensive game released, ever. Weird huh?

[–] theangriestbird 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What is your deal? Do you believe that gaming should only be a hobby for the wealthy, or?

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[–] dom@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The specs until recently were not as intensive but still pointed to the game not being super optimized.

Minimum was a 780 (3gv)

I expected that buying a 6650 (8gb) would have put me well over the minimum requirements.

MINIMUM:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows® 10 Home 64 Bit

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-4790K / AMD® Ryzen™ 5 1600X

Memory: 8 GB RAM

Graphics: Nvidia® GeForce™ GTX 780 (3GB) or AMD® Radeon™ RX 470 (4GB)

RECOMMENDED:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows® 10 Home 64 Bit | Windows® 11

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-9700K | AMD® Ryzen™ 5 5600X

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Graphics: Nvidia® GeForce™ RTX 2080 Ti (11GB) | AMD® Radeon™ RX 6800 XT (16GB)

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Exactly. I still don't get 60fps on the first one, a now 8 year old game on top of the line hardware. I don't care. People here act like performance optimizing is just turning a knob they forgot, but it's hours of detailed work finding anything and anything that may be able to shave nanoseconds off.

If the game is playable, I'm happy. It's not a twitch shooter. It's a city simulation.

[–] Lojcs@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago

It's not a deal breaker, but high fps is always preferable when using anything with a gui

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I don't know, this whole 60fps thing is a new demand from gamers. Frankly I don't care about reviews anymore. Everyone skews negative, and I'm tired of it.

My hard takes:

  • 60fps doesn't matter. It's not a shooter. Even CS1 I could only get 50ish on a new map, and that's with hardware that's 6 years newer than the game.
  • RAM should be used. For gaming it would be wasteful not to use it. If you aren't using all your ram then you're loading textures, shaders, and everything from disk, which is thousands of times slower and that would lead to .. you guessed it, gamers bitching about lag. What are you using that ram for anyway when you're gaming that's a higher priority? If you're watching someone and they're complaining that a game is using too much ram shut them off. They don't how computers work. These aren't the days of 256MB of ram. I have 32 gigs. I want them to use it.
  • Marketers are paid to lie. They don't understand what the game can do, they're paid to sell it. Cyberpunk was disappointing for many because they believed marketers running unleashed, saying the game would be a revolution, that it would be gaming evolved. It wasn't. Instead gamers "only" got a fun open world RPG and they were disappointed by it. (And bugs, they had legit concerns but marketing was stupid around that game and every one of their marketers should have been fired )
  • I find that people who watch reviewers are exponentially more disappointed in games because they let reviewers tell them how to feel. If you want to start enjoying games more, stop letting them tell you if you should be disappointed. They're going for clicks and views, and the rage train gets a lot of them. Just try it and return it if you don't like it.

I haven't watched anything and I'm excited. I'm not "hyped", I don't think it will redefine city building forever. I think I will enjoy my time in a game that is by definition an iteration of the franchise. Maybe it'll be great. Maybe it'll be worse than the first, but I'm going to decide that myself, not let some reviewer begging me for a subscribe tell me.

[–] ReversalHatchery 14 points 1 year ago

60fps doesn't matter. It's not a shooter. Even CS1 I could only get 50ish on a new map, and that's with hardware that's 6 years newer than the game

It does not sound like 50 FPS on 6 years old hardware. Maybe half?

RAM should be used. For gaming it would be wasteful not to use it.

Don't be afraid, I do use my RAM. Like, it's full of other important programs and filesystem cache.
But the game shouldn't take it away from other programs, and it should also be aware of the fact that windows starts swapping out programs when RAM usage has reached ~70%. This will significantly affect any programs you run simultaneously, but the game itself tooz because it's less used memory pages will be swapped out more. Random access for reading back swapped pages is much slower than loading the resources in smaller groups sequentially.

16 GB usage sounds like the game has loaded ALL of its models and resources, even those that are not needed (not in view, and probably not even accessible to the player), and probably has multiple copies of most with different resolution and such.

Loading to RAM that much data would be fine if they managed it to only be loaded to a cache, that can be released for other programs, but I don't think you can do that in any other way than using the filesystem cache, at which point the RAM usage does not even count against your process, or as usage at all.

If you aren't using all your ram then you're loading textures, shaders, and everything from disk, which is thousands of times slower and that would lead to .

Obviously the game does not have to use all the RAM. It only needs to preload textures and models that are useful on your system (based on graphics settings) and are in use right now or can be in use very soon.
Also, loading from disk is not as slow as you make it seem. Yes it is if your users install games to a drive that's bad for that purpose (like SMR tech hard drives), or if you haven't placed the resources strategically, by which I mean grouping resources so that commonly-used-together resources are placed sequentially for a quick and efficient read.
The first problem shouldn't be your concern: the player shouldn't expect top performance from hardware that was designed for a totally opposite task.

Marketers are paid to lie.

Yes, but they shouldn't touch any technical information, including the hardware requirements section. Marketers don't know shit about the game, just that they want to sell at much licenses as ~~humanly~~ possible.
The hardware requirements, however, is to be defined by those who know shit about the game. Preferably core developers or performance testers, who have an idea about the game's inner workings and about how much is it expected to use in average and in the worst case.

I find that people who watch reviewers are exponentially more disappointed in games because they let reviewers tell them how to feel.

I can agree with that and your point on Cyberpunk. I haven't played that game, but not because I'm not interested. It looked fun from content that I have seen.

But the performance concerns sound like that it's actually a huge problem.

I like it that so far it has been described a solid lunch except land leveling and performance, because the first one can probably be addressed in a few months at most if they want it. But even the published hardware requirements were disappointing, and this is a signal that the game will hardly get any better than that, if it can reach it.

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[–] liamwb@lemm.ee 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I mostly agree with this post, but

the focus of Cities: Skylines has always been on building beautiful cities (vs. having a realistic simulation)

this is simply not true

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[–] Rentlar 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If I wanted a mature, well-performing city-building game experience I'll play Cities: Skylines 1.

From the reviews on that page, it sounds like Colossal Order delivered on the features it promised, but has lots of performance optimization left to do. By the sounds of it, on my laptop I'll probably get 20fps and occasional stuttering on my gaming laptop by 10k population. I will see whether it is playable for my standards once it officially releases. I'd probably expect many game updates addressing performance and bugs in the first 6 months of release.

The demand and happiness mechanics are fundamentally different so it's important not to try to play it like CS1 and expect the same results.

I've been looking forward to this game for months. Can't wait for Tuesday, I'm theirs to disappoint.

E: corrected developer

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[–] jarfil 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

even with RTX 4090s and lowering the graphics to 1440p medium settings. Based on utilization numbers, it sounds like the GPU is limiting factor here.

What are the CPU utilization numbers? C:S is a notoriously CPU-first game, particularly with mods. If your CPU can't calculate more than 10fps, you won't get more than 10fps.

Those same streamers are also reporting 16GB of RAM usage when loading up a new map, which means that the minimum recommended spec of 8GB was a blatant lie from the devs.

It starts (barebones, slow as hell) with 8GB. You want 32GB or more for it to run somewhate decently.

Seriously, people don't understand what "cache" means, maybe they should just create a ramdisk and install the game there to understand the concept.

[–] 0x442e472e@feddit.de 13 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Seriously, people don't understand what "cache" means, maybe they should just create a ramdisk and install the game there to understand the concept.

I believe people with lots of RAM simply enjoy the feeling of theoretically being able to run everything, but they don't actually want processes to use that RAM, because it would deny them the theoretical possibility to run everything.

I jest, of course. The problem is that as a user you don't have that much control over which process should use your RAM, and also freeing RAM is hard. Chrome gobbling up your whole memory is good when you're using Chrome, but you don't get it back when you alt+tab back to your game

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[–] 1simpletailer@startrek.website 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Between this and Star Trek: Infinite seems like Paradox's new MO is to set unreasonable deadlines and rush games to release. You should basically consider all their games early access at this point, except they'll charge you for updates. They've learned that a buggy half-baked release wont effect their sales, and they can just patch the game and crank out new features as dlc.

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[–] Devion@feddit.nl 12 points 1 year ago

Well, maybe this is why AMD is bringing back threadripper?

[–] Narrrz@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago

I can't say I'm surprised. I was wondering whether I should jump in on day 1, since I played C:S 1 pretty heavily, and want to support the devs, but this definitely means I'll be waiting at least a few patches.

[–] Vordus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 1 year ago

My suspicion is that the game would have been delayed had the new Harebrained Schemes game not just flopped.

[–] ijeff@lemdro.id 10 points 1 year ago

Well that's disappointing. Also noticed this review: https://www.gamesradar.com/cities-skylines-2-review/

[–] dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

A game like this is not going to release without bugs. It's just not going to happen. Expect Colossal to patch it fairly rapidly and over the course of a few years release all of the DLC that will make it feel like a rich city building experience. For now, I'll stick to C:S1. No need for the pitchforks and torches.

[–] theangriestbird 16 points 1 year ago

No one is expecting the game to release with 0 bugs. It's the severity and quantity of bugs that is the issue.

FWIW, my current take is that this release would be fine if they had simply released it in early access.

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[–] peter@feddit.uk 8 points 1 year ago

Game companies get greedier, gamers want bigger and better experiences for less money, investors want higher returns, computers aren't getting faster at the same rate and the game industry can afford to treat it's employees like shit because there's always going to be a constant stream of new people who want to work in it.

[–] CarlsIII@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Can you at least make perpendicular roads easily? I had trouble doing that in the first game.

[–] theangriestbird 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's a pre-release video from City Planner Plays that discusses the new roadway options. I believe even C:S1 added in snap-to-angle options eventually, which made it very easy to build roads at right angles. Unless you mean parallel roads? This is something that vanilla C:S1 did not have, but it looks like C:S2 has that on launch. The new road-building tools are one of the features that had me most hyped.

[–] CarlsIII@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

Oh cool, maybe I’ll check out skylines 1 again

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[–] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I never play these types of games but I distinctly remember my friend having a full on meltdown about how fucked up the first Cities Skylines was like a decade ago, lol.

[–] Chobbes 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I guess you're just talking about one person, but I think Cities Skylines was received quite well in general? I just remember a bunch of praise for Cities Skylines (in contrast to Sim City 2013 which a bunch of people had a meltdown about).

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