and the heart of the problem. Gamers have forgotten that games are tradeoffs. Counter Strike has high FPS and the expense is lower detail. Cities opts for higher detail and fidelity over having higher FPS. Of course studios would love to give every game 120FPS at 4K ultra, they didn’t just decide not to do that. Optimization and squeezing a few more frames per second is tedious work. It’s not some switch in the engine they forgot to flip. It requires pouring over millions of lines of code, deciding to create this class instance later, to move this memory allocation to another place, to deciding what to cut out to make it just a smidge faster.
I stand by my other comments. Gamers have become entitled that their systems should run brand new games at perfect ultra settings. That’s not how it ever worked. Brand new systems are out of date the moment you buy it. The only way to guarantee anything to run at perfect ultra for every game is to wait 5 years after it released on hardware that just came out.
This is so incorrect though. Nobody is expecting every game to run on every system at 4K@120Hz. CS has more fidelity and higher framerate than Cities, Rainbow Six Siege has even more fidelity and even more framerate than the both of them (talking like 600+ fps). Cities bottleneck should be CPU as it was in the first game. It should run very well to begin with and slow down the bigger and bigger the city gets, but that’s not the case, it runs like ass from the get go. They built it from scratch, which is the best time to make sure it is performant during development, but in most cases devs seem to rush for feature complete instead, especially in the current environment of consumers accepting half-baked games.
It’s not entitlement to expect more and it makes no sense to defend lackluster performance in games, if you don’t care then just carry on enjoying it and let others ask for better. Again 1080p@120Hz is hardly an ask these days, any GPU/CPU from the last 8 years can handle that shit perfectly fine, hell even mobiles can run that now.
Games should be built to run well on today’s hardware, not built to let future hardware take over. Incentivizing upgrades is just going to create more e-waste.
It is though. You’re comparing apples to oranges - you can’t compare an FPS to a top down strategy. Even Cities 1 never had a great framerate, even 8 years later on modern hardware it still chugs, and it doesn’t have nearly the fidelity that Cities 2 has. The only reason the GPU is the bottleneck is because of the fidelity. If you turn down the graphics settings to Cities 1 level, guess what, the CPU becomes the bottleneck again.
For another example, Age of Empires 4 locks the zoom level because they couldn’t handle showing too much on screen. You just can’t demand the same rates as an FPS. Completely different parameters. You’re expecting an M1 abrams tank to have the agility of a honda accord and the speed of a masarati, when you really needed something something that could seat 20 people.
You brought fidelity and Counter Strike up. Cities Skylines 2 is not exactly an ‘impressive’ game to look at, a more stylised approach is better for this type of game, it doesn’t need to look real and you spend hardly any time zoomed in anyway to notice fine details. Just looking at graphics the game performs horrendously for what it looks like. I don’t think Cities Skylines was a bad looking game and I don’t think Cities Skylines 2 trading off more performance for not a big leap in ‘fidelity’ is worth it. I think Cities Skylines looks better and more refined myself honestly, the art style fit it really well.
I can demand whatever performance I want? From FPS I expect higher than 120 even, it’s just what is better for that game. For builders 120 as a baseline minimum is not a big ask and I would still expect it drop into the 90s and 60s once you build your city/whatever out. If you are fine stuck at 60fps or lower with all your games then congratulations, but I expect more from games these days that aren’t exactly pushing the bar in other areas. I don’t think graphics make a game, but games have been at a point where they don’t need to look any better for years now, so performance should be the focus.
Wat. This ain’t counter strike. This is a city sim. The hell do you need 120fps for so much that it should be minimum?
For smooth panning? Why would I want less?
Cause it costs more to run that and it isn’t necessary for a good gaming experience.
and the heart of the problem. Gamers have forgotten that games are tradeoffs. Counter Strike has high FPS and the expense is lower detail. Cities opts for higher detail and fidelity over having higher FPS. Of course studios would love to give every game 120FPS at 4K ultra, they didn’t just decide not to do that. Optimization and squeezing a few more frames per second is tedious work. It’s not some switch in the engine they forgot to flip. It requires pouring over millions of lines of code, deciding to create this class instance later, to move this memory allocation to another place, to deciding what to cut out to make it just a smidge faster.
I stand by my other comments. Gamers have become entitled that their systems should run brand new games at perfect ultra settings. That’s not how it ever worked. Brand new systems are out of date the moment you buy it. The only way to guarantee anything to run at perfect ultra for every game is to wait 5 years after it released on hardware that just came out.
This is so incorrect though. Nobody is expecting every game to run on every system at 4K@120Hz. CS has more fidelity and higher framerate than Cities, Rainbow Six Siege has even more fidelity and even more framerate than the both of them (talking like 600+ fps). Cities bottleneck should be CPU as it was in the first game. It should run very well to begin with and slow down the bigger and bigger the city gets, but that’s not the case, it runs like ass from the get go. They built it from scratch, which is the best time to make sure it is performant during development, but in most cases devs seem to rush for feature complete instead, especially in the current environment of consumers accepting half-baked games.
It’s not entitlement to expect more and it makes no sense to defend lackluster performance in games, if you don’t care then just carry on enjoying it and let others ask for better. Again 1080p@120Hz is hardly an ask these days, any GPU/CPU from the last 8 years can handle that shit perfectly fine, hell even mobiles can run that now.
Games should be built to run well on today’s hardware, not built to let future hardware take over. Incentivizing upgrades is just going to create more e-waste.
It is though. You’re comparing apples to oranges - you can’t compare an FPS to a top down strategy. Even Cities 1 never had a great framerate, even 8 years later on modern hardware it still chugs, and it doesn’t have nearly the fidelity that Cities 2 has. The only reason the GPU is the bottleneck is because of the fidelity. If you turn down the graphics settings to Cities 1 level, guess what, the CPU becomes the bottleneck again.
For another example, Age of Empires 4 locks the zoom level because they couldn’t handle showing too much on screen. You just can’t demand the same rates as an FPS. Completely different parameters. You’re expecting an M1 abrams tank to have the agility of a honda accord and the speed of a masarati, when you really needed something something that could seat 20 people.
You brought fidelity and Counter Strike up. Cities Skylines 2 is not exactly an ‘impressive’ game to look at, a more stylised approach is better for this type of game, it doesn’t need to look real and you spend hardly any time zoomed in anyway to notice fine details. Just looking at graphics the game performs horrendously for what it looks like. I don’t think Cities Skylines was a bad looking game and I don’t think Cities Skylines 2 trading off more performance for not a big leap in ‘fidelity’ is worth it. I think Cities Skylines looks better and more refined myself honestly, the art style fit it really well.
I can demand whatever performance I want? From FPS I expect higher than 120 even, it’s just what is better for that game. For builders 120 as a baseline minimum is not a big ask and I would still expect it drop into the 90s and 60s once you build your city/whatever out. If you are fine stuck at 60fps or lower with all your games then congratulations, but I expect more from games these days that aren’t exactly pushing the bar in other areas. I don’t think graphics make a game, but games have been at a point where they don’t need to look any better for years now, so performance should be the focus.
I suppose they could implement smooth panning in high fps even if actual updates would be slower… though it might look funky.
Our computers are more powerful than ever, but our games run worse than ever before. I love the future