General Gaming Cities: Skylines II - extensive technical analysis indicates performance issues due to rendering FAR too many polygons ("makes Cyberpunk 2077 look like Minecraft in comparison")

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Cities: Skylines 2 devs are investigating faster patches and a fix for the 'huge' packs of abandoned feral dogs | PC Gamer

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Don't fix what ain't broke, I say.

 

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Cities: Skylines 2 released in a less than ideal state, and most of the talk around the game has centred around how Colossal Order intends to fix various issues with the game's performance. Now, the studio has resumed its weekly "CO Word of the Week" feature—last sighted in 2018—to keep players updated on its progress. Specifically, at least for the first post, its progress on garbage patches and roaming gangs of stray dogs. What's going on over there, you guys?

 

Written by Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen, today's Word of the Week focuses on the game's launch, which "was overshadowed by technical issues which caused disappointment, and rightfully so." 

 

 

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Hallikainen says the devs are working on it, and says they're investigating "how we can speed up the patching process so we don't have players waiting for these important fixes longer than necessary." The CEO continues to say that, although the first patch for the game included some tweaks to LOD levels, the team is still working on it and that "finding optimal LOD levels is a balancing act between visual fidelity and performance," and that more fixes would come soon, "including the characters and their teeth!"

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Speaking of patches...

 

Cities: Skylines 2 patch fixes 'unnecessarily large' character textures, removes 'offensive' radio ad | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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Citizens might start hogging less processing power, though we're still not completely sure about their teeth.

 

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A patch for Cities: Skylines 2 has been released today, addressing several issues with the game—though it doesn't sound like it's the overhaul needed to soothe the city builder's biggest performance problems. Hopefully, that patch won't be too much longer.

 

One issue that should improve as a result of this patch is the Cities: Skylines 2 not enough customers problem, which has been frustrating and a little confusing—the game often shows demand for new commercial zones, but at the same time existing businesses inform you they don't have enough customers. As a potential fix, the patch increases "leisure probability" which I assume means citizens will have more free time to visit shops, and thus businesses won't complain as much.

 

There are more tweaks to businesses, like an "improved balance of companies' profit" and the fixing of a trade resource bug that meant businesses would order supplies even when they didn't have enough storage space for them, and then wouldn't consume resources they had. Hopefully, this means you'll have an easier time keeping your city profitable, which I personally have had issues with in my game.

 

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Really quite interesting technical analysis that posits that the game's performance issues are largely related to the fact that it's rendering FAR too many polygons.

 

A tech analysis of Cities: Skylines 2 proves it's rendering WAY too many polygons, making Cyberpunk 2077 look like Minecraft in comparison | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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Making games is hard but harder still when you have to use tools that are still in development.

 

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A technical analysis of the graphics rendering in Cities: Skylines 2 has identified the reason why the performance is just so poor. Put simply, the game is trying to draw the cityscapes using a shocking number of polygons, with few systems in place to reduce the amount when it's not needed. It's not something that should be happening in a modern game but the recent breakdown also suggests changes within Unity are partly to blame, too.

 

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I learned the full answer to that puzzle over the weekend, via a short Reddit post. It contains two things: A link to a technical analysis of the game, involving a spot of decompiling and rendering software tools, and an excellent discussion of the findings. The breakdown was carried out by software developer Paavo Huhtala, who explored the game's inner workings with a fine toothcomb.

 

It's a long and dense read, especially if you don't know much about rendering, but the primary issue is that the cityscapes are being drawn using way too many polygons. And I mean by multiple orders of magnitude too many. How do 25,000 vertices (corners of a triangle) sound for a simple clothesline model?

 

 

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If you need a point of reference, take the clothing models used in Cyberpunk 2077. Some of them use an enormous number of polygons and I've seen one with as many as 29,500. But that's triangles and these will share corners, as they're 'stitched' together. The actual number of vertices for that jacket could be as low as 8,000.

 

There's so much going on in the Cities: Skylines 2 engine is making nearly 7,000 draw calls and over 50,000 API calls (requests made by the game, via DirectX) in a single frame. Now those figures by themselves, and set in no context don't mean very much, but they're both enormous in general and indicative of the game asking far too much of the GPU.

 

For example, taking a random scene in Cyberpunk 2077's cityscape shows fewer than 10,000 API calls are required to render the frame. Now, one can't directly compare these two games as they are so very different, and city-sim games are likely to be making more calls than any shooter, as the world changes so much and fills up with lots of interacting models. But even so, 50,000 is…well, a lot!

 

 

The actual (very comprehensive!) technical analysis:

 

Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly - paavohtl's blog

BLOG.PAAVO.ME

[CitizenVectron]

So a few weeks post-launch, and the game is pretty great. Still a few performance issues, but not bad. While the game doesn't have as many features as CS1 did at the end of its life, it is far, far ahead of where CS1 was at launch, especially in terms of road building and layouts. Biggest issue at this point is no modding, which likely isn't coming until Q1/2 2024, which is very disappointing.

 

So overall, the game is great, but will be much better next summer.

[Keyser_Soze]

Cities Skylines 2 dev offers refunds, makes DLC free, apologizes

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Cities Skylines 2 dev Colossal Order will refund buyers of the Beach Properties DLC and make the pack free, as it apologizes for the sequel.

 

[CitizenVectron]

It's such a shame that they were forced to release the game instead of delay—the core of it is much, much better than CS1, and a 1-year delay would have made the launch incredible. Mods should be coming soon, and once that is released I plan to return to it.