Unacceptable performance on PC

[Neonwarrior]

I've got an RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and I can't play this game above 80 fps with DLSS-Balanced at 1440p.

How is this possible? This is a game visually dominated mostly by giant barren white fields of snow. I doubt there is a significant polygon count. Even the buildings inside of districts are abstracted and scaled down compared to the previous game. And aside from the fire from the generators and steam hubs, gusts of wind and falling snow, there are hardly any complex or demanding particle effects. Yet the performance is significantly worse even of that of Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield, and other visually demanding games.

It seems to be a purely GPU-intensive game... it can't be CPU, right, I mean it's not like all of the thousands of citizens are being individually rendered and simulated like they are in Cities: Skylines which causes slowdowns on longer playthroughs. Instead this game just barely chugs along even when there are no buildings/districts whatsoever and it's just baffling to me. What exactly is the game rendering that's taking THIS much processing power!?

[Raptor Jesus]

80 fps is more than enough for this game.

[Neonwarrior]

Originally posted by Raptor Jesus:

80 fps is more than enough for this game.

Yeah, 80 fps using 100% of my GPU. Have you considered that perhaps this not only stresses the GPU but also drives up my electric bill? And that's with upscaling technology, so the *true* performance is even worse.

[Solacex]

I don't blame ya. Running a 4080 here with DLSS and frame generation; it still doesn't feel good.

[Neonwarrior]

I just saw on the Store page that the minimum GPU requirement is a 1050ti and recommended is a 2060. I think a 2060 would be completely unable to run this game at 1440p at 60 frames even with DLSS on Performance, and a 1050ti probably can't even achieve 30 on all low settings without some serious use of FSR upscaling.

Other games that use Unreal Engine 5 do not perform this poorly. I played RoboCop: Rogue City for example and got at least 40-50% better frames than this game and that's with significant action happening on screen. I imagine others like Tekken 8 and Black Myth: Wukong also perform significantly better even though I'm making assumptions here as I haven't played them.

For a game without Ray Tracing and with upscaling this performance makes no sense! It's a city-builder for crying out loud, not a tech showcase of a photo-realistic New York City.

[Chompman]

Originally posted by Neonwarrior:

I just saw on the Store page that the minimum GPU requirement is a 1050ti and recommended is a 2060. I think a 2060 would be completely unable to run this game at 1440p at 60 frames even with DLSS on Performance, and a 1050ti probably can't even achieve 30 on all low settings without some serious use of FSR upscaling.

Other games that use Unreal Engine 5 do not perform this poorly. I played RoboCop: Rogue City for example and got at least 40-50% better frames than this game and that's with significant action happening on screen. I imagine others like Tekken 8 and Black Myth: Wukong also perform significantly better even though I'm making assumptions here as I haven't played them.

For a game without Ray Tracing and with upscaling this performance makes no sense! It's a city-builder for crying out loud, not a tech showcase of a photo-realistic New York City.

Assume that the default specs they recommend hardware on is 1080p unless they specifically say otherwise as some games do these days.

[Mr Chicken]

Originally posted by Raptor Jesus:

80 fps is more than enough for this game.

Did you forget the part where upscaling is mandatory and needs to be turned on to at least balanced and a bunch of settings lowered? The game is poorly optimised, these devs like many others have neglected performance and are just using upscaling as a crutch to be lazy with optimisation.

Stop defending poor performance, the type of game is completely irrelevant poor performance is poor performance and that is unacceptable no matter the game.

[WelvynZPorter]

4080 here and I can't get stable 60fps at 2560 × 1600 even with dlss and frame generation on. This is the first game I can't run in a while.

[Dave]

Originally posted by Neonwarrior:

Originally posted by Raptor Jesus:

80 fps is more than enough for this game.

Yeah, 80 fps using 100% of my GPU. Have you considered that perhaps this not only stresses the GPU but also drives up my electric bill? And that's with upscaling technology, so the *true* performance is even worse.

That's nonsense that it "stresses" the GPU. GPUs and CPUs are made to run at 100% as long as they are properly cooled. And your GPU running at 80% vs 100% isn't going to use THAT much more power.

Also if your GPU is at 100% then, it's not cpu bound. It's GPU bound.

That said, the game is horrifically optimized and needs serious work and patching.

[Dave]

I'm running at at stable 144fps at 1440p with everything on Ultra, DLSS Frame Gen, and DLSS upscaling set to Ultra (DLAA)

i9-12900K @ 5.5 GHz, 64 GB RAM, RTX 4090, and my GPU is right at about 95%. If I switched DLSS out of DLAA and down to quality. I'd probably even get better performance, but 144 is enough for me.

The issues I have is the game has a lot of hitching and stuttering. It's poorly optimized

[xCeezyx]

Is it on an SSD?

[Dave]

Originally posted by xCeezyx:

Is it on an SSD?

That would have no bearing on FPS - only load times.

[Neonwarrior]

Originally posted by Dave:

That's nonsense that it "stresses" the GPU. GPUs and CPUs are made to run at 100% as long as they are properly cooled. And your GPU running at 80% vs 100% isn't going to use THAT much more power.

That said, the game is horrifically optimized and needs serious work and patching.

What I mean is that it reduces the GPU's lifespan. Unless the enlightened one wants to claim that GPU's don't have lifespans and can last forever "as long as it's cooled properly"?

This simply isn't true for every GPU. There are so many parts involved that can fail or be made to fail. My EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra has massive voltage issues and will crash unless I undervolt it in MSI Afterburner. I even RMA'd it but the problem is still there. So in this case I actually *can't* use it at 100%. The problem is the voltage regulator I believe. You might say "well that's your problem, you have a faulty card," but to that I say "how do you think electronics fail to begin with?" There's always a problem, a bottleneck, a weak link, something that will break. It might be more complicated than a yes or no, but certainly at 100% usage any electronic will have its construction put to the test.

[Raptor Jesus]

Originally posted by Mr. Chicken:

Originally posted by Raptor Jesus:

80 fps is more than enough for this game.

Did you forget the part where upscaling is mandatory and needs to be turned on to at least balanced and a bunch of settings lowered? The game is poorly optimised, these devs like many others have neglected performance and are just using upscaling as a crutch to be lazy with optimisation.

Stop defending poor performance, the type of game is completely irrelevant poor performance is poor performance and that is unacceptable no matter the game.

DLSS is here to stay like it or not. I turned it on quality on my 3080 and didn't turn on a FPS monitor, game felt fine to me at 1440p.

Just did a check and i get ~75-80 fps with everything on ultra dlss set to quality.

BTW your GPU is supposed to run as close to 100% as it can.

[ELDEN LORD]

lol...

[Metals]

Its not that bad and will improve as patches come, my gpu is hitting 99% most of the time which general means good optimization. I've only noticed small frame skips in cutscenes.

I'm on a 4070ti super and getting 90+ fps with everything maxed - 1440p 144hz