If 90% of gamers can't play a game, is it still worth releasing it like that?
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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at 4K/High Settings
Do you believe 90% of gamers will be playing at 4K/High settings?
... on AMD's most powerful GPU.
I mean... At the current state of the game, 0% of gamers will be playing at 4K/High settings.
I don't know what "high" refers to in this instance, but in general I kinda wish every game had their very highest settings targeted to future hardware. Not by necessity of bad optimization, but simply because it feels stupid playing older games that cap render distances, LoDs, foliage amount crowd sizes, lights, shadow qualities etc to hardware limits that were set a decade or two ago.
Just make it obvious and don't call it "Very High" or "Ultra", but directly just "Next-Gen" or something in the settings and have it target like 720p 30fps on a 4090.
I think I'm pretty confident in saying most people aren't interested in sub 60 FPS, especially if it's at 1080p and looking the way it does (which is mostly flat and unimpressive)
That's the most shocking part, the high-end hardware needed to brute force a 1080p game at acceptable framerates
Eh, I'm fine with it in this style of game. A shooter I will not. BG3 I accepted running around 30 and didn't even feel it. It's not a twitchy game. It's a top down city builder. As long as it's responsive, it doesn't really need to run at 60. It's probably the ideal game to target 30.
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That's basically what Crysis was when it released, so yeah why not?
Because Crysis for its time was breaking barriers in terms of graphics and physics. City skylines 2 doesn't even look that good (graphically). So it just comes down to poor optimization that will get fixed after half a year to a full year of patching. This isn't a great look even though they said "But we said it will perform poorly".
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Really disappointed that after a solid 3-4 months of dev diaries, open communication and hype for the game, they drop this performance bombshell on us at the last moment.
They get points for at least giving everyone a weeks notice, but that's clearly a calculated move (compared to if they kept it quiet entirely and it launched with people unaware)
I'm not instead on playing sub 60 FPS games at 1080p, especially not when I've got a 4090+13900k and it crushes almost every other game in existence. The game isn't pretty enough to justify such terrible performance, it's just purely unoptimized now.
Why there's no DLSS / FSR also at launch is baffling, it helps GPU bottlenecked necked games greatly (even if boosting from a native 30 to 60 is a bit yuck)
Really disappointed
Like you said, they aren't trying to hide it. I'm sure they weren't sure where performance would end up at launch though. They publicly said they aren't satisfied with the performance and will be working to improve it though. This isn't the end of it. It's disappointing it doesn't perform as well right now (for us and I'm sure even more for them), but they've earned some amount of trust. I'll give them time to get things where they should be.
From the couple of creators I've seen paying it, they were aware of some performance issues for sure. I think they were just unaware at how severe the impact was (since content creators normally have expensive PC's) and how quickly they'd be able to address it.
It never sounded like they were aiming for being super optimised at launch either, but it did seem like they were confident "most" would be able to play it prior to the announcement.
And having watched CityPlannerPlays performance video of it, it sounds like the article didn't really play around with things to see what different settings' impact was. Specifically regarding resolution, it was noted that anything above 1080p seems to be extremely poor in performance.
Why there's no DLSS / FSR also at launch is baffling, it helps GPU bottlenecked necked games greatly (even if boosting from a native 30 to 60 is a bit yuck)
I believe I had heard something about them having issues with getting it running, because for some reason they included their own "render scale" option that runs like ass. You can, fortunately enough, very easily add DLSS to most games even if they don't natively support it though. That's most likely what I will be doing.
If I had to guess the reason they waited so long is cause they thought they could fix them before launch, but stuff probably came up that made them realize it's not gonna be ready.
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GPUs have been general-purpose many-core processors for like fifteen years now. Please stop designing simulations that run exclusively on CPU... and especially stop tying your simulation speed to the goddamn renderer.
I've written a 60 Hz renderer for a game that's allowed to chug while you glide smoothly through it, and I've written a 60 Hz physics engine for a game that gets fractional frames per second, and I'm just some schmuck. What is your excuse? What kind of NP-hard nightmare did you design for yourselves, instead of identifying bottlenecks and faking the hell out of them? SimCity could run on 8-bit microcomputers. You cannot possibly be struggling to reach an acceptable minimum complexity, using hardware that's forty years newer and ten thousand times faster.
I'm pretty confident the game isn't tied to framerate, and also the game is almost always GPU bottlenecked from what I've heard. From what I've watched of the game, it has a ton of compute shaders and other shader work. In particular, weather is apparently a large cause of framerate issues, particularly temperatures. That's because (I'm betting) the game is computing temperatures on the GPU and using that to draw snow and other things on the terrain and also structures. I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing. They just did too much, and now they need to try to optimize it.
They don’t work on a custom engine. So they don’t have engine programmers so they don’t know how or probably can’t (i don’t know how you would do that in Unity). That’s the price you pay for ease of development
If Unity is so dodgy that a team of professionals can't figure out how to spread a workload over time, they should have written it off immediately. The nature of their game was not a surprise. They're not naive in this genre - it's a direct sequel.
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Don't worry. They'll release optimization as a DLC.
It’s known performance will be poor, but if it was that bad the ton of YouTubers doing their preview coverage would have been reporting it.
No, there was a performance embargo for reviewers that wasn’t lifted until after the developers had made their statement a few days ago.
It was pretty funny seeing stuttery footage on 60fps YouTube videos without any acknowledgement from the player lol
And they thought that just ignoring such clear issue was a good approach to take? Wow that's fucking scummy on both sides
There is a reason for them to not report on it. They were still working on the game (and they still are even). They don't know how the performance will end up at release until it's there. Reporting on it too early just misinforms people.
Well, surely if they're playing it 2 weeks before it's due to launch and it runs like garbage, they'd think "hmm, maybe this won't be ready in time. I should probably tell people about it" rather than just being greedy and sweeping it under the rug. Also, you can be honest about issues you experience with the people watching your content. If it gets better before it's released, you just make an update video stating you've seen an improvement over time. No need to hide it
I've watched a good bit of the game so far. I don't think anyone hasn't discussed performance. It's not something being hidden, it just isn't where it should be or where they want it to be, and they've been clear they're going to continue working on it to get it where it should be. They just can't hit that target for launch. Delaying it wouldn't be great either because plenty of people will be able to run it, just not as well as it could be. That's OK in my opinion.
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They do. Look at city planer plays video. According to this, I can hope to get a bit more then 30fps at 1080p with medium details with my 4070 ti and 7600x. Beyond that, I‘ll get a slideshow. For most PC owners out there, the game will be unplayable in it‘s current state.
Most YouTubers have beefy rigs. Also, the preview build could have some kind of limitation which was never intended for the final release but which improves performance
Probably will trial it and then wait for sale. By the time it goes on sale, it should run better lol
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So, this is releasing on Playstation and Xbox aswell? How the fuck will they be able to run it -at all-, 480p and 30 fps on low?
Linked article is nothing but Unreal Engine fanboy masturbation.
Those people are fucking weird.
Also a bizarre comparison. Cities 2 is a simulation game - they are very CPU intense games. The graphics are nice but it's likely it's problems with balancing the CPU demand and the graphics that is the problem, rather than the graphics themselves. Simulation bottlenecks will drop the FPS drastically, regardless of the graphics engine.
From what I'e seen of the game on Twitch, I think the performance issues aren't game breaking. It seems the game runs fine if you reduce settings; while it's far from ideal it looks playable.
But it will be damaging for the game. Mods won't launch until after the game is launched, and that may be delayed further by time taken fixing the game post launch. For a game that suceeded in a very large part due to user content that may really harm the game's success.
Linked article is nothing but Unreal Engine fanboy masturbation.
UE having better 3D performance than Unity isn't really that much of a hot take. Unity got that much traction because of its really favorable licensing terms before the recent change.
Have you seriously not noticed how there's this weirdo subset that feels the need to throat UE every chance they get?
Why does the author specifically mention UE and not any of the other engines on the market? Why not Source, which is renowned for being one of the most flexible and performant engines out there?
UE fanboyism is real and it's fucking weird.
Have you seriously not noticed how there’s this weirdo subset that feels the need to throat UE every chance they get?
No, I didn't but I'm also not diving into every tech subculture.
Why does the author specifically mention UE and not any of the other engines on the market?
My guess is because of its versatility and the rumor from a couple of months ago that Cities 2 was UE-based. As an open source proponent myself, I would like to see the CryEngine-derived Open 3D Engine (O3DE) or Godot to gain more traction but at least the latter is still lacking on some features other 3D engines have for ages – I seem to recall to read a few weeks ago that shader stuttering is still a thing even in the newest Godot release. I don't think any shipped product is using O3DE, so using that would be a big gamble for a relatively small development studio.
Why not Source, which is renowned for being one of the most flexible and performant engines out there?
Source 1 is pretty outdated and Source 2 is used by Dota2 and two FPS games.
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Also worth noting that Skylines 2 comes out on Xbox game pass day 1. You can usually pick up a trial for a fortnight, that's a pretty perfect opportunity to try this on PC (to see how bad it runs for you)
That's what I'll be doing, trying it out and most likely skipping it for a few months while they polish it up
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