Thoughts on performance

[tjmccann]

Hello All,

As I have stated before I tried the game when it first came out and got a refund after 30 minutes of play. Just purchased the game a week or so ago and am having a great time playing City Planners updated guide for beginners. So far I have it dialed in to run the GPU at 50% and CPU ant 50 % (RTX 3060 Ryzen 5600). I'm far from taxing the system city size wise so time will tell however:

I bought Falcon 4 when it came out in 1999 (I'm 69 yo). The sim brought most systems to it's knees and the online play was terrible however we never gave up. They dropped the sim and the code was leaked and taken over by some extremely talented guys. It is still being played today and the hardware caught up to the sim some years ago. ArmA is another example of software that completely trashed systems when it first came out.

It's a never ending battle between hardware and software. My hope is they don't abandon the software.

[john.glossop]

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only SOB playing this game. At 78, I sometimes wonder about myself!

[Viking2121]

I never refunded, I like the game, disappointed in it of course, but I would be lying saying I didn't have a little bit of fun with it despite its flaws, and I do hope it gets better sooner than later, its a perfect game to kill time at my own pace.

But atm, I haven't really touched it much after dumping about 200 hours into it, performance gets too bad for me to enjoy it, I could deal with the bugs if the FPS was above 30 and the sim speed didn't go crazy.

[Viking2121]

Originally posted by girlaroundthecorner:

I'm in my 60's and have enjoyed CS2 since it was gifted to me last Christmas. I don't know if I'm imaging things but the game seems to have improved performance recently. Don't know about CPUs or GPUs etc, but my population is larger than it's ever been at about 220,000 and it's only just slowing now. Previously I could only get to about 150,000. GeForce has put out some updates, so maybe that's it? Do the developers do sneaky updates lol? Dunno.

I can reliably hit 300k pop on my 5950x, a bit after that might be fine, depending on how the city is flowing I guess, but around 350k, sim speed starts to take a bit of a hit, like all traffic and peds, air plans, ships will slow at random, 400k, out right pausing for maybe a half a sec or so, of course FPS is in the teens in the heart of my city on a 3090ti, the game gets severely bottlenecked by the CPU as the GPU sits around 30% at 400k pop while the CPU sits at 100%. So a better GPU wouldn't do much, a faster CPU might help a little, but even a high clocked 14900k would end up still running into issues.

My 1.2 mill pop city is a slide show zooming up in the middle of it with nearly 2 second sim pauses, its not fun, bad experience honestly.

CS1 being as old as it is and not looking that much different, plays perfect at 1mil pop, I would of expected CS2 to at least let you dial it down to be like CS1 on at least low quality settings, but at a point graphics on high or low mean absolutely nothing to performance after a point.

[tjmccann]

Originally posted by john.glossop:

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only SOB playing this game. At 78, I sometimes wonder about myself!

That made me laugh - thanks

[V_Cred]

Originally posted by Viking2121:

CS1 being as old as it is and not looking that much different, plays perfect at 1mil pop, I would of expected CS2 to at least let you dial it down to be like CS1 on at least low quality settings, but at a point graphics on high or low mean absolutely nothing to performance after a point.

Although they look very similar, the cause of such a difference in performance relies on the code, CS2 has a lot more pathfinding queries per frame of the simulation, thus the performance cost is so elevated.

Maybe it would be better to have a more simplistic simulation (and better performance) like CS1 does and retain all the good visuals and quality of life of the second.

[mikelleh63]

I believe they kind of shot themselves in the foot with the CIMs in CS2 versus CS1. It was a noble effort, but is hurting performance. In CS1 there were about 30 different CIMs in total. Just in different colors. In the new version they are randomly generating each CIM by choosing different hair styles clothing, body style and color. This creates a large database of CIMs. It looks great, but past a certain point it creates a huge bottleneck in the CPU and GPU. This gets even worse because of the path finding which is constantly being updated. To see this for yourself, find a large queue of people at a train stop or trying to cross a road. It is trying to render ALL of the CIMs individually and it just pukes on its own shoes. Then all of the CIMs in the queue are all looking for a better path to their destination which will start to melt down your PC. Again, it looks great seeing all the different CIMs running around, but it is killing performance. My max seems to be around 350k pop when these issues make the game unplayable. Is great to that point though.

[franzeusq]

If a mod or CO doesn't give the option to change the sims for cardboard ones, this game will never be worth playing.