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:
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?
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
Yes, erm… totally about building beautiful cities.
Thats what I always thought of the game.
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.
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
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
Actually… you can do it with two .bat files and a “ram cleaner” tool:
- Suspend all “chrome.exe” processes
- Free all working sets (since Chrome is suspended, it marks all the RAM used by Chrome as swappable/discardable)
Now your game can use all the RAM, the OS will just swap out or discard whatever was in use by Chrome as needed.
Want to go back to Chrome?
- Resume all “chrome.exe” processes
The OS will swap in whatever it swapped out, and let Chrome ask for as much RAM as it feels like.
Stop using Chrome is a great first step. Seriously people. This is Lemmy. We’re better than that.
Feel free to use any other browser, they all allocate RAM preemptively just the same.
Free all working sets what the fucking hell??? No, no, no, I don’t want to send my full browser to swapfile just because of a greedy game. Loading back all the memory pages will take a lot of time when I want to switch back to the browser, and it will lag for quite some more time until all the not too frequently used but important is loaded back too. This also applies to the reverse: swapping the game out and back in will take a ton of time, and then it will have lag spikes when it needs a dozen of memory page that is somewhat more rarely used and haven’t been loaded back with all the rest. This nonsense of literally using all your ram “as a cache” but as working set just makes everything slower in the end. This just cannot be justified. There’s a reason I’m using a multi tasking PC instead of a single-tasking gaming console, which you can only use for one purpose at a time.
And don’t tell me to put my swapfile on my SSD. This is the perfect way of killing yours, with writing 16 GB of data every time you switch between windows.
I don’t want to send my full browser to swapfile just because of a greedy game
You don’t, most of the times the game doesn’t use all that memory anyways (or crashes if it tries to… so still, doesn’t use it).
Loading back all the memory pages will take a lot of time
No it won’t. Browsers preemptively allocate a bunch of RAM just in case they need it… then never use it. “Loading back” empty memory, takes zero time.
This also applies to the reverse
No it doesn’t. Games rarely can be suspended and resumed successfully, and they rarely allocate RAM that they aren’t going to use. I was clear when I said you suspend “chrome.exe”, not “your game.exe”. If you resume the browser without exiting the game, the game stays in RAM and the browser manages with what’s left (surprisingly, they manage to run a tab or two without a problem, which further proves they didn’t “really” need all that much RAM in the first place).
swapfile on my SSD. This is the perfect way of killing yours
My swapfile SSD got retired after 10 years when I switched to a NVMe, it’s an external drive now.
writing 16 GB of data every time you switch between windows.
As explained above, no you don’t, most of the data simply gets discarded, maybe 1-2GB of it gets actually written. To further expand on that, the swapfile gets constantly pre-populated with less changing in-RAM data so the OS can “swap it out” instantly. That same data stays in the swapfile after it gets read into RAM again, so it doesn’t get written to the swapfile over and over, only read back.
There’s a reason I’m using a multi tasking PC instead of a single-tasking gaming console
If you do, then you put more RAM in it. Otherwise, you can use it as a gaming console. Your choice.
Loading back all the memory pages will take a lot of time
No it won’t. Browsers preemptively allocate a bunch of RAM just in case they need it… then never use it. “Loading back” empty memory, takes zero time.
Yes, it will, and I’m saying this from experience. I have 32 GB of RAM but since I have dozens of tabs in several windows open, the browser really consumes a lot of RAM. When windows starts swapping it out, even just a little because I’m over 70% utilization, I can feel that it got slower.
And on the occasion when in PH I accidently click “empty working sets” instead of “combine memory lists” and windows swaps out everything, it’s horrible for days until I just give up and reboot instead.
Games rarely can be suspended and resumed successfully
Probably I’m playing with the wrong games then, as those that I play don’t crash from it. One such example is Factorio where I have did that a lot in the past.
I was clear when I said you suspend “chrome.exe”, not “your game.exe”.
Now I understand, but then your workaround does not allow for switching back to the browser for looking up something.
surprisingly, they manage to run a tab or two without a problem, which further proves they didn’t “really” need all that much RAM in the first place
1-2 tabs maybe work fine. But the whole user interface will also be slower to respond, and if you have addons which need to do this or that when a page loads, then that 1-2 tabs won’t be usable either.
Also, I doubt that windows wouldn’t swap out parts of the game.If you do, then you put more RAM in it. Otherwise, you can use it as a gaming console. Your choice.
I won’t spend on anywhere North of 32 GB. This is not a fucking server. I would rather just not play games that are so out of touch with reality. To back that up, I’ve just read someone else posted a steam statistics page that says only ~20% of steam users have 32 GB of RAM, while most of the rest has only 16.
Also, when I have built this PC I have heard multiple remarks that 64 GB RAM may not be a good idea, because the hardware memory manager would be slower with managing that amount of RAM than 32, which is important for games that move a lot of data in the RAM.
when in PH I accidently click “empty working sets” instead of “combine memory lists” and windows swaps out everything, it’s horrible for days until I just give up and reboot instead.
“Empty working sets” doesn’t swap out anything by itself, it marks it as “swappable” but stil in RAM. It does make a copy to swapfile in case it needs to swap it out so it can do it instantly.
To fully force a swap out, you have to clean the lists… level 1, I think? (sorry, in bed, don’t want to look it up RN).
If you did that with a HDD however… yeah, I can see how that would feel bad.
Pro tip: don’t leave PH open for too long, it’s kind of a devel tool and has some bugs that can mess up the hooks of the whole system. Best is to open, use, close, for ~15 day uptimes on Windows 8 to 10 without ECC.
I have 32 GB of RAM but since I have dozens of tabs in several windows open
I used to play games with 8 GB of RAM and 40 tabs in Chrome. It was either-or, it worked, didn’t kill the SSD, for years. 🤷
Dude 51% of steam users have 16gb. 22% have 32gb. It’s probably lower in the broader gaming public.
32gb is still pricey and far from standard. 16gb should at least be fine. 32gb to be “somewhat decent” is beyond unreasonable.
32gb of DDR4-3200 RAM (fairly middle of the road RAM) is like $100.
“32gb of RAM is a week’s worth of groceries”
You want 32GB or more for it to run somewhate decently.
No, you misunderstood. I don’t want, like at all. That is totally undue. What fucking engine was this crap written in, electron or what???
The worst is not even the resource usage, but that there are actual people defending this bullshit.
What fucking engine was this crap written in, electron or what???
Unity with C#.
That’s only half the problem… the add-ons are also written in Unity with C# 🤷
Is unity and c# really that bad by itself? I don’t have much experience in c# development, but I was in the impression that c# is a relatively fast language (not as much as c++ but much, much more than js, python and even java)
Is unity and c# really that bad by itself?
No, they’re pretty nice, that’s why they got popular. It’s when you pair them with game development, that shit hits the fan.
Basically, you have:
- Rocket software - if it fails once, you fucked up
- F-35, infrastructure software - if it fails, it better recovers fast
- Business software - if it works for most of the workday, it’s fine
- Consumer software - if it works most days, it’s fine
- Game software - if it eventually works at least once, you’re fine; most people don’t care about replaying the same story anyway
Unity and C# are very easy to make utter crap with, and still have it “work at least once”… which leads game developers to use it, make it work, and have it packaged and sold. Add to that “modders”, who are mostly random people who want to see some [part] of some idea they had, work maybe once in the game… and you get a perfect recipe for disaster: rushed out games, with sloppy mods, often conflicting with each other.
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
Paradox is just the publisher on this one, Colossal Order is the dev.
Ah you’re right… I’ll fix that
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Find me a performance patch in any Paradox game that requires you to buy a fucking DLC to apply.
Or maybe just quit bullshitting.
FFS, we’re talking about a relatively small developer/publisher that continually supports and develops most of their games for the better part of a decade (or more, like EU IV). I thought this shit is what people wanted but what it seems most gamers want is just any excuse to fucking whine.
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“they can just patch the game and crank out new features as dlc” does not have the same meaning as “buy a fucking DLC to apply a performance patch”
lern2reed
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.
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.
“with this hardware”, found your problem.
Yep we better all go drop $3k on a new computer so we can get this game to playable fps!
So, exactly as every other resource intensive game released, ever. Weird huh?
What is your deal? Do you believe that gaming should only be a hobby for the wealthy, or?
It is indeed much easier to argue against things you made up and not what was posted.
Where as I stated no such thing, you already have the answer. But, no, I do not believe the straw man you put forth to claim I intended.
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)
I see no justification for why CS 2 is this resource intensive.
It’s a heavy city simulation game, so high CPU usage is kind of expected (though I think it could be better), but what about the RAM and GPU requirements and actual usage?And I said nothing about justification. But, the RAM is easy to figure out as that is where the variables are stored and manipulated. A “heavy city simulation game” is going to have a great many variables and lots of formulae.
The GPU usage is likely to get the picture to be very pretty. But you could argue against it. The RAM, no, it is required by the genre.And I said nothing about justification.
You said that it is a resource intensive game, in a tone that implied to me that it’s fine to you.
But, the RAM is easy to figure out as that is where the variables are stored and manipulated. A “heavy city simulation game” is going to have a great many variables and lots of formulae.
But not this much. CS 1, which is also a “heavy city simulation game”, was totally fine with less, and while I agree that because of the new features it is expected that CS 2 uses more RAM, it is not expected to use this much more.
Also, you are talking as if every vehicle, pedestrian, building object each should cost 1 KB of RAM or something like that. Normally that’s not the case.
The GPU usage is likely to get the picture to be very pretty.
Unconditionally loading 8k textures for all the existing models won’t make the game “very pretty”.
As in every sensible game, texture resolution and such should be configurable, and the game should not load textures not in use. At least one of these is very clearly not happening if the game requires multiple gigabytes of VRAM even on a new, basically empty save.
My fps is also around that in CS 1 and honestly it hasn’t bothered me that much unless I look at the fps counter. While it would be nice to have 60 FPS, I don’t think much about it while actually playing.
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.
Yeah I play a lot of rimworkd and dwarffortress and to be honest the only difference between playing it on my of the line pc and my 10yr old laptop is that it takes way longer to do stuff at max speed, which isn’t really how I play games like this. This review kinda sold me on this game.
It’s not a deal breaker, but high fps is always preferable when using anything with a gui
I’ve gotten so used to 60 fps that if I play below 60 it makes motion sick
It’s still something I’d rather have than not; not having it makes for a less fluid experience.
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.
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).
Being better than later Sim City games isn’t much on an achievement, doesn’t mean that CS wasn’t quite janky at the start.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I dunno – I’m sympathetic to the DLC argument, but bad performance isn’t something I can forgive on launch day. I’m sure they’ll patch it in time, but if I buy a full-priced game, I expect it to run decently well. Anything less makes for a poor user experience. If a publisher truly cares about user experience then they won’t release a game in that state, or if they do, they’ll make it 100% clear on the storefront that the game has performance issues.
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And that for a game that looks like shit.
It’s a less cartoony art style I think (although the style in original skyline evolved a lot) we will see.
Remember mods can fix/change loads
If you compare the game on max settings to modded C:S1 (and if you ignore the leveling plot issues), I actually think it looks better than C:S1, or at least pretty close.
…which makes it pretty terrible. What did they change/improve if not the graphics? It should be so ahead that you don’t even have to think what looks better.
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On days like this I ask myself if the reason games are released that broken is because there are no real software engineers in the game industry. Like a carmack with doom. Someone who understands the technical site of things.
There is a theory that games release like that to punish pirates, as anything but the launch version - and DLCs - rarely gets pirated.
Gamedev is all about smokes and mirrors. A conventional software engineer will actively resent the shitfuckery you have to do, to make games run well (for good reason; it introduces complexity into already insanely complex systems).
Some performance work, you cannot defer, like fundamental design decisions (3D vs. 2D, raytracing or not) or if you’ve coded a tiny feature and for some reason, it completely obliterates performance.
But there’s always going to be tons of features that have been implemented well, they don’t obliterate performance, but if you replace them with an unintuitive/complex smoke-and-mirror solution, then you may be able to shave off 20% execution time for that feature. Or not. Often no real way to know, except to try it out.
Some of these do need to be tackled throughout development, too, but it’s easy to end up with a big block at the end of development.
Especially, if you had to rush a number of features that marketing promised, so that you can make the release date that marketing promised many months before anyone has any fucking clue how long it’ll take.
It feels like every Paradox sequel is worse than the previous game lately. CK3 is garbage compared to CK2 for instance, even after years of DLC.
I played both CK2 and CK3 and have to say I love CK3. The create your religion system is so awesome and the events are great. I dont even feel like touching CK2 anymore aside from some mods
For CK and Vic they changed their design philosophy to be more “sandbox with realistic parameters” vs older games’ “sandbox with prescripted events” to make historical events happen. It’s an ambitious idea but so far the results have been pretty mixed. I’m hopefully they get it right eventually. Stellaris has really only gotten to be as polished as it very recently.
They also changed their philosophy so fewer and worse DLC, at least for CK. It does not appear that CK3 will ever have feature parity with CK2.
Well that’s disappointing. Also noticed this review: https://www.gamesradar.com/cities-skylines-2-review/
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.
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.
I mostly play CS1 with mods (but very infrequently), and now it seems I’ll stick to that for the time being
