The mistery of bad performance revealed

[Øuantum3]

CPUs recommended by Paradox:

The base clock frequency speed of the Intel Core i5-12600K is 3.70 GHz
The base clock frequency speed of the Intel Core i7-6700K is 4.00 GHz

Ultra modern CPU base clock frequency speed.

i9-14900K is 3.2 GHz (24 cores/32 threads).
i7-14700K is 3.4 GHz. (20 cores/24 threads).
i5-14600K is 3.5 GHz. (14 cores/20 threads).
i9-13900KS is 3.2 GHz (24 cores/32 threads).
--
Now my CPU, an i7-4790 is 3.6GHz (4 cores/4threads). None of the above CPUs is faster, except for the i7-6700K.

Then the question araise: It's worth spending so much money in modern CPUs? Well... no.

I have a GTX 1080 8GB of VRAM; 32 GB System RAM and a 2 TB Stick SSD drive.
The game performs at 24 FPS.
Most games will perform better in any of the other CPUs, but this one in particular will not due the Engine, which is Unity. Unity isn't fully multithread compatible, as Unreal Engine is.

That's all the mistery behind the performance issue vs "why my super modern computer don't run the game so fluently". Must save this info for me.

Drop your PC Specs and FPS in the comments.

[Merc]

I'm happily in the middle with my 10900k. But I won't buy this game unless they fix all the issues with it. The game is complete ass.

[Bashem]

So an Intel problem?

[Øuantum3]

I guess I'm responding to all of you. My post is a theory I have since I have watched a video with different PCs testing CS1 time ago, in which the game performed better on an octo-core with no hyperthreading than on one with lots of cores and threads.

These are the base clock frequency speed of the CPUs you all have mentioned:

AMD 7950X 4.5 GHz.
13700k 3.40 GHz.
I9 13900KF 3 GHz.
I9 13900k 3 GHz.
AMD 5900x 3.7 GHz.
i7 8700k 3.7 GHz.
10900k 3.7 GHz.

You all have fast CPUs, except for the I9 13900KF 3 GHz and the I9 13900k 3 GHz; all the others are in the gren zone, so it should not have so much frame drops.

Have you experienced frame drop with settings set to high at 1080p? That would be interesting to know, because since the CPUs mentioned are in the green zone, they should show no problems. But this is a theory for this game only, so I need your counter arguments to evaluate if what I think is right or false. As long as we have these processors, I can't know if my theory is false.

[☻]

Why are you concerned with the base frequency? I'm just curious because these chips will stay at boosted levels pretty much all the time when they are being used. For example, my 7950X3D will run at 5Ghz on all cores if all 32 threads are loaded at 100% utilization. Usually when playing a game one of the CCD's with 8 cores will stay at 5Ghz and the other CCD that is not being used will run at 4.5Ghz. Basically all cores that the game is using will stay at 5Ghz so the base speed of 4.5Ghz has no real effect on it's game performance. It only drops to base frequency when the cores are not in use.

All 8 performance cores on the 13900K will run around 5.3Ghz as well. The 13900K will run at higher frequencies all the time when playing a game vs the 8700K and 10900K despite having a lower base frequency. The 13900K will also process more data per a clock cycle than the other Intel chips while running at those higher frequencies.

Hyperthreading can cause slow behavior on some games but this game is not programmed to use hyper threading or more than 8 threads so it won't use more than 8 physical cores and 8 threads. It will park one of the CCDs on AMD's 7950X3D and intel's efficiency cores cannot be used for gaming so they make no difference and are also parked. Both the 13900K and 7950X3D have more on die cache than previous gen chips so they will be able to navigate some bottlenecks more efficiently than older series CPU's in this area as well.

Intel's latest chips and AMD's latest chips have similar IPC and Intel has a very small boost clock advantage while AMD has a cache advantage. They perform pretty similar overall but some games favor one brand over the other at times. It depends on weather the game prefers cache over clock speed but overall AMD looks like it might be an insignificant 1 or 2% faster when averaging large groups of games. The one area where AMD wins is power efficiency which leads to cooler operation and less noise from the cooling solution because is uses half the power to reach the same performance levels as Intel. Other than that they are pretty much equal. The 7950X3D and 13900K should run this game the best regardless of how many cores they have or what their base frequency is.

It's important to note that neither of these high end CPU's should be the limiting factor in cities skylines 2 because the game will hit a Graphics bottleneck before it hits a CPU bottleneck. Everyone's performance is bottle necked by the GPU when using high end CPU's on this game.

Your CPU is old and it's IPC and cache cannot match modern CPUs. It's boost frequency cannot keep up with the 13900K and the boost clocks are what matters when playing games. The resolution you play at and the graphic settings you use in combination with the graphic card you own will all play a roll in weather or not you are CPU bound in this game. The highest end CPU's have more power than this game needs but your CPU may be limited depending on your systems needs. I would install MSI afterburner and monitor the CPU and GPU usage.

If your GPU is not maxed at 100% then you have a CPU limitation and will benefit from a more modern CPU. If both the CPU and GPU are not fully utilized then the game engine is the limiting factor and upgrading your system will not help until the developer fixes their game engine. It looks to me like cutting edge hardware hardly provides an advantage so it's probably the game engine that is not optimized or using the hardware to it's fullest. Which means there is no point upgrading anything at the moment until they finish optimizing the game.

One last thing, base frequencies exist to cut down on power usage when the system is idle. So when you have your desktop loaded up but you are not doing anything, the cores will drop to base values so the chip doesn't use more power and produce more heat then it needs to. When the chip is in use it will boost to the max while it is being used so boost speeds are all you should care about in regards to gaming. Unless you have a heat problem and your CPU is throttling back to base levels to avoid burning up.

[Øuantum3]

Diposting pertama kali oleh ☻:

Why are you concerned with the base frequency? I'm just curious because these chips will stay at boosted levels pretty much all the time when they are being used. For example, my 7950X3D will run at 5Ghz on all cores if all 32 threads are loaded at 100% utilization. Usually when playing a game one of the CCD's with 8 cores will stay at 5Ghz and the other CCD that is not being used will run at 4.5Ghz. Basically all cores that the game is using will stay at 5Ghz so the base speed of 4.5Ghz has no real effect on it's game performance. It only drops to base frequency when the cores are not in use.

All 8 performance cores on the 13900K will run around 5.3Ghz as well. The 13900K will run at higher frequencies all the time when playing a game vs the 8700K and 10900K despite having a lower base frequency. The 13900K will also process more data per a clock cycle than the other Intel chips while running at those higher frequencies.

Hyperthreading can cause slow behavior on some games but this game is not programmed to use hyper threading or more than 8 threads so it won't use more than 8 physical cores and 8 threads. It will park one of the CCDs on AMD's 7950X3D and intel's efficiency cores cannot be used for gaming so they make no difference and are also parked. Both the 13900K and 7950X3D have more on die cache than previous gen chips so they will be able to navigate some bottlenecks more efficiently than older series CPU's in this area as well.

Intel's latest chips and AMD's latest chips have similar IPC and Intel has a very small boost clock advantage while AMD has a cache advantage. They perform pretty similar overall but some games favor one brand over the other at times. It depends on weather the game prefers cache over clock speed but overall AMD looks like it might be an insignificant 1 or 2% faster when averaging large groups of games. The one area where AMD wins is power efficiency which leads to cooler operation and less noise from the cooling solution because is uses half the power to reach the same performance levels as Intel. Other than that they are pretty much equal. The 7950X3D and 13900K should run this game the best regardless of how many cores they have or what their base frequency is.

It's important to note that neither of these high end CPU's should be the limiting factor in cities skylines 2 because the game will hit a Graphics bottleneck before it hits a CPU bottleneck. Everyone's performance is bottle necked by the GPU when using high end CPU's on this game.

Your CPU is old and it's IPC and cache cannot match modern CPUs. It's boost frequency cannot keep up with the 13900K and the boost clocks are what matters when playing games. The resolution you play at and the graphic settings you use in combination with the graphic card you own will all play a roll in weather or not you are CPU bound in this game. The highest end CPU's have more power than this game needs but your CPU may be limited depending on your systems needs. I would install MSI afterburner and monitor the CPU and GPU usage. If you GPU is not maxed at 100% then you have a CPU limitation and will benefit from a more modern CPU.

Well, you quite nailed the topic. If this game can't benefit from multithreading, then the base clock speed is fundamental. Of course there are other variables, but narrowing those to only the speed clock, it leads us to the base speed clock, as some games don't benefit from turbo-boost feature. There are some CPUs with lot of cores and threads, but slow base clock speeds, so something in the middle should perform better without wasting money.

I'm following how the game uses the resources and the GPU is at 98% while the CPU goes from 40% to 60%, as well, Windows can't make use of more per application in certain cases (like gaming).

I'm thinking on buying a new PC, so I'm diving in this topic, as I also use the PC for work with photographyediting, music composition and sound design, so I'm trying to have all covered once I get a new PC.

Thank you very much for your insightful response :)

[☻]

To be honest, The base speeds really shouldn't be considered when gaming. My 7950X3D has a base clock of 4.5Ghz but it idles at 5Ghz on the desktop and if I run my virus scanner it will boost to 5.2Ghz. I have never seen the CCD being used running lower than 5Ghz ever and I have not overclocked my CPU. You will only see base frequency when cores are not used and are parked by programs that can't use them.

The 7800X3D will give you the highest IPC, cache and boost speeds that are very close to the best resulting in the best overall performance for any game. The 7800X3D will also be the most efficient high performance game chip you can buy with the lowest temps and will be the easiest to cool quietly. If you do alot of video editing or 3D art like I do then you can benifit from the extra 8 cores on the 7950X3D or the Efficiency cores on the 13900K but for gaming, no game will benifit beyond 8 cores with hyper threading.

It's been nice talking with you, I wish you luck with the new rig. Buying a new computer is always a good time. I actually enjoy doing the research before the big purchase as you can tell I just bought mine recently so I'm up on the latest tech at the moment.

[Costarring]

R5 5600X (Noctua NH-D14 cooler... Maxed out (Ryzen Master) it runs between 60-70 celcius and reaches 4.7GHz without breaking a sweat (when the max clock is listed @4.6GHz)
RX 6600 8GB (1080P)
Gigabyte B450 Aorus Elite (My first AM4 board, which I bought with a 2600X)
64GB 3600MHz DDR4 (XMP 2.0) (64GB because I played C:S1 with lots of mods, and memory counts in that regard)
M.2 512GB
Winblows 10

Anywho. While playing C:S2, my CPU runs at 20% on all cores.
RX 6600 runs @ 80-90%
Not checked memory usage yet (no mods yet, so no interesting at all)

Anywah... Multi-threading. One thread for display, one thread for sound, one for traffic, one for economy etc. If all those threads (by themselves) don't give a big load on the CPU.
People think that each thread should max out (99-100%) each core.
That is not how things work, in reality...
All those separate threads need to be synched to the slowest thread (otherwise everything will desynch).
So the PC is always waiting for the slowest thread. And this is why your CPU doesn't max out on all cores/threads.


FWIW, buying a new PC.
If you buy 1 PC with the best of the best components, you can also buy 2 PC's, which are also capable of handling the game, for the same price.

[Gixxer Jax]

11900K, RTX 3070 8 GB OC, 32GB RAM @ 3600MHz and game installed on m.2 SSD... I can get into the game but every 2 mins I get a major freeze that lasts about 15-20 seconds. Game runs smooth between the freezes.. but yeh, completely unplayable in this state. Hope they release an optimisation patch on the microsoft store in the next couple days..

[Half Phased]

OP, you seem to be conflating base clock speed of CPUs with per core performance.

A: modern CPUs have turbo boost, where they can easily boost into the mid 4GHZ and beyond if single core performance is required and heat dissipation isn’t an issue. This is before we even get into overclocking.

B: modern CPU are far more performative due to changes in chip architecture, allowing more instructions to be performed per cycle. To explain it like this, if I have 2 CPUs, one that does 4GHZ and one that does 3, the one running at 4 should be faster. But if the one running at 3GHZ does two instructions per cycle, rather than 1, it’s actually faster.

C: raw CPU speed is not the only factor in game performance. While intel 13th gen processors absolutely smashed AMD on benchmarks, in real world scenarios (i.e. gaming), the AMD 7950 wins out, due to its larger cache sizes allowing it to process large file sizes faster, such as save files in stellaris, cities skylines and factorio.

And finally, the 13600K i5 in my PC would run laps around the i7 you claim is faster… and it does, it beats the 4th gen i7 on every single benchmark, including single core speed.

[tschaedL]

Ryzen 5 3600
GTX 1080
32GB RAM
Full HD (instead of QHD)

40-50 FPS atm, low/mid settings mix

[tschaedL]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Gixxer Jax:

11900K, RTX 3070 8 GB OC, 32GB RAM @ 3600MHz and game installed on m.2 SSD... I can get into the game but every 2 mins I get a major freeze that lasts about 15-20 seconds. Game runs smooth between the freezes.. but yeh, completely unplayable in this state. Hope they release an optimisation patch on the microsoft store in the next couple days..

Maybe this is the automatic save when it is every two mins, look in the settings.

When it saves it "freezes" a seccond~

[Stealthy]

CPU with fastest single core performance wins, and that's 14900K. Base clocks are what they are, boost clocks are the ones that matter.

I'm playing with 12900K and RTS 3080 and my FPS stays over 20 all the time, initially on empty map it is 50+ This is with 5120 x 2160 res.

Now, I got Hyperthreading disabled. That means I got 8 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. What disabling HT gave, is solid 5.1 Ghz clocks on performance cores (all core under load) and 4.1 Ghz on efficiency cores, again all cores. This keeps CPU temps at 75-80 degrees at any given time when playing. 2 performance cores tap out to max pretty quickly and 6 others fluctuate, but by 100k residents they are mostly between 75 and 100%, up and down all the time.

Efficiency cores are typically around 50% utilisation. I could probably over clock even higher on both core types, but I'm ok with the performance as it is.

[Eekhoorn]

Now my CPU, an i7-4790 is 3.6GHz (4 cores/4threads). None of the above CPUs is faster, except for the i7-6700K.

I'm not an expert, but take a look a this:

i7 6700K vs I9 14900K
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-vs-Intel-Core-i9-14900K/3502vs4151

i7 6700K vs 4790
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4790/3502vs2293

[Skylieden]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Øuantum3:

CPUs recommended by Paradox:

The base clock frequency speed of the Intel Core i5-12600K is 3.70 GHz
The base clock frequency speed of the Intel Core i7-6700K is 4.00 GHz

Ultra modern CPU base clock frequency speed.

i9-14900K is 3.2 GHz (24 cores/32 threads).
i7-14700K is 3.4 GHz. (20 cores/24 threads).
i5-14600K is 3.5 GHz. (14 cores/20 threads).
i9-13900KS is 3.2 GHz (24 cores/32 threads).
--
Now my CPU, an i7-4790 is 3.6GHz (4 cores/4threads). None of the above CPUs is faster, except for the i7-6700K.

Then the question araise: It's worth spending so much money in modern CPUs? Well... no.

I have a GTX 1080 8GB of VRAM; 32 GB System RAM and a 2 TB Stick SSD drive.
The game performs at 24 FPS.
Most games will perform better in any of the other CPUs, but this one in particular will not due the Engine, which is Unity. Unity isn't fully multithread compatible, as Unreal Engine is.

That's all the mistery behind the performance issue vs "why my super modern computer don't run the game so fluently". Must save this info for me.

Drop your PC Specs and FPS in the comments.

I have a 9th gen I9 and a 3080 FTW3 12GB. I also have 32gb of ram. Now I do get good performance however in task manager, the game is utilizing nearly every PC resource GPU and CPU wise. The issue is optimization of their game engine. Yes it is to date for todays hardware but if you have a high end PC like I do and look at Task manager performance metrics you will see how much of a hog on resources this game is as of right now, and go compare that to other titles. I may get good performance but SLOBS is taking a major hit just like any other software including my browser. Nothing functions properly for how much this game takes in resources so it is very safe to say this game is just needing some more TLC from Paradox. Give it time, some of you may not have a hardware problem but for now, it's going to be rough.

At the highest settings, I am utilizing %98 of the GPU and almost 90% of the CPU. This is certainly not normal.

[Eevilflamee]

12700f

Evga 3070 super

32gb 3600 RAM

1tb ssd

Game doesnt use all my cpu or gfx

But it crashes

Crashes

Crashes

Cra...........