All credit for these guys for being honest about performance, but I refuse to pay to be a beta tester, I'll be waiting until it's fixed or a cracked version so I can test it out first.
Cities: Skylines
An unofficial sublemmy for the game Cities: Skylines.
Honestly, as long as you have a decent computer (like not potato-grade hardware) the game is pretty playable in low settings. But I totally see your point of view
I admit I'm too much of a slut for graphics for low settings and with what I paid for my PC I shouldn't have to give up on it.
I have a decent computer, and I can barely get more than 10fps after the city grows more than a few blocks.
I have a 3090Ti and on every save so far, the game becomes borderline unplayable right around 12-13k pops. Complete FPS drop plus intermittent freezing that doesn't end until I close the game. I would be fine with this on an early-access game, which is what they should've released CS2 as initially.
I have a gtx1660 super and my city is currently at around 12k pops and the performance hasn't gotten much worse compared to when I started my city
After tweaking the biggest offenders in settings and enabling TAA to make it look better, it looks good and performs acceptably. Yes, the performance is worse than it should have been, but it's far from catastrophic as people have been saying.
Otherwise, I'm very happy the game seems to be a lot more of a simulation and management game than C:S 1 was. It's something that I was very much missing from the first game.
I'm having fun so far and I will keep playing, seeing how stuff changes as the game progresses and I learn new things.
Played for about 5 hours and have enjoyed all of it!
Initial thoughts about the gameplay: So far it's great and feels like a good step up from CS1. Seems to be "harder" to generate a positive cash flow, especially if you have no outside connection in the start. There are some things to get used to and things that work differently compared to CS1 so I keep messing things up for myself. And damn some buildings are huge!
There are some issues thou: Performance is an issue but not nearly as bad as some reviews/Steam Reviews made it out to be. I have a quite old CPU and a 3070, and happily play at 1440p with medium settings (have not done any manual tinkering). Had some weird issues in the main menu (map images disappeared), and one wired hard crash 10 minutes after launching the game first time. Also get some graphics glitches/artifacts at times, but nothing I would consider major
The main menu is really weirdly laggy. I can actually get better performance in game than in the menu which is odd.
I think the problem is that any performance optimisations you do don't actually apply to the menu until you restart.
Have you checked the notification window in the bottom right of the menu to see if textures are still processing? I have the issue as well and it dissapears once it's finished.
Only played about 90 mins so far. Performance is MUCH better after turning dynamic resolution off or to constant (which looks a bit shit). After that it’s pretty smooth at lower resolutions.
I like the game so far but I need to invest much more time to get a better overall picture.
I really don't get what dynamic resolution is supposed to do because it just looks terrible and makes the game laggy.
Yep! This usually scales the game resolution up or down depending on load but it appears to be buggy right now (or I misunderstand it). If it's a bug, I wonder how it slipped through since this setting is enabled by default.
I think maybe the issue is the game targets 60 FPS which isn't really possible on anything other than high-end enthusiast cards.
What I don't get is why it tanks performance. I'm wondering if they are dynamically building the textures in memory in real time rather than relying on LODs.
Performance isn't the best but I didn't really spend time optimising it in settings.
Love the scale of things. Wanted to plop down the international airport to see what it looks like and damn, that thing is enormous.
I think they should improve some of the visual indicators for roadsnapping, building placement etc. Getting roads to like up correctly is a bit finicky, when placing buildings it's hard to see what they are colliding with. Changing the direction on one-way roads should also just be a click like in CS1.
I'm going to stick with my unfinished CS1 city for now since I'm just going for a beautiful city with a bunch of mods but interested to see where CS2 ends up in a couple of years.
The main menu was very laggy at 4K while I was trying to reduce the resolution... but it was stable and playable once I got it working. I think performance optimization will allow me to see the game in its beautiful glory.
I'm happy to have finally played it. My city is now at 20k, and there's still a bunch of mechanics I still don't have any idea how they work.
I really love the extraction district that have vehicles pop out every now and then.
It was when I watched unemployed person in my city jaywalk across a busy interchange was when the game felt the most alive to me.
I'm happy it runs at all on steam deck. Hopefully performance improves by the time I make a larger city. It's surprisingly controllable but the graphics are glitchy.
Only a short time with it, but I’m loving it so far. Feels streamlined from CS1 on a good way.
I'm probably gonna get the game in a couple of months, when the bugs are fixed.
I need to properly get my head around some systems, for example how to get a budget profit and what to do with the endless demand by commercial to "please build more low density residential, we need more customers".
I really enjoy building some things (mostly streets) that were not possible in C:S1.
I think I just hit that point. Nearly insatiable demand for low density housing. “We require additional single-family pylons”
I've got major fps drops on the menu (after tuning the recommended settings) on a 3090Ti, and was hitting some random bugs right away in the game. I'll come back to it in a few months, hopefully performance is way better and everything's more polished by the time the console edition releases.
For some weird reason the FPS are really bad on the menu, but not in the actual game from both my first experience and what others have said as well
I did wind up doing a few maps and have been getting decent FPS initially, but as soon as I hit 13k pops in any save, I suddenly get straight up freezes every 30-45s. Game definitely has potential but imo should've had the PC release delayed alongside consoles.
It's a lot better on an SSD. For some reason it seems to actually load stuff from the hard drive so having fast read speed seems to help.
But sincerely wish I could enable vsync it's a jagged mess otherwise.