Thanks for the shoutout Linus & Alex, was a great surpise! Hope everyone enjoys this response and let's not all get bent out of shape because Linus said "crashed"...at 1fps it may as well have! Although it wasn'ty always 1 fps! Enjoy the video and the fun 🙂
The bottle neck here seems to be the simulation speed, not the video rendering. Simulation speed is driven by CPU power and I think you would see a noticeable improvement to your game speed if you went for an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X or AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, which of course would also require you to upgrade your motherboard and your RAM (to DDR5, from your current DDR4). That would double your cores, but would set you back about US$800 - US$1000 with the processor, motherboard and RAM.
The issue is Pathfinding. All of those agents (citizens) need to valuate their path. Also they need to update their positions in the world. It is just limit of basic stuff that hardly can be done in conventional ways. Grats to the devs that it is able to use the CPU at 100% taking to the fact how many changes to paths can happen at any moment.
@@BiffaPlaysCitiesSkylines IN THEORY :D that should accelerate the game even more, but than in practicality I dont think the game is even optimized to do such a task. You see, there is the problem that even if you can increase max core usage (which may not be an issue as I would assume its just hardcoded limit in the code and it is designed to be expandable easily) than you will meet an issue of synchronizing all the threads (code run on a core) to get the solution on time. All the threads need to be synced at one point to update everything and than the results need to be processed, often on main thread (main loop of the game) to get consistent game tick (one frame). You could increase from current limit of 64 threads (cores) to 128 and get only 20% speed increase for example ... In case of rendering like benchmarks it is bit different because each of the cores renders piece of the screen and it does not matter if they all are displayed at the same time, so you save lots of time on synchronization. Its rather complicated thing to do for a game :D Im getting sweaty when I even only think about it and im Game Dev Programmer :D
There does appear to be some sort of curve to it. My city of ~550k runs on a 5900x and you would think that with double the pop it would take double the cpu but it is clearly using way more than double for this 1mil city. I think we will see a lot more performance over time as they update the game.
This is correct. You've the same issue to some extent with GIS databases. What hogs it is calculating the sheer amount of lines you're putting on. Your computer can easily handle files of 150 mb, and open a movie of 2 gb easily, but if I give you a 40 mb map of a municipality in all its details it's going to bring your computer to a screeching halt for seconds.
Came here to say this. I always giggle whenever Real Civil Engineer mentions Biffa. Like recently when RCE created himself a traffic problem and wondered if Biffa could fix it. Problem is that RCE has a tendency to include… not-all-age-appropriate content. But it was hilarious. 😂
a dwarf fortress player could have predicted this for CO. a lot of forts die not because they're overrun by serpent men, or a goblin army, or a steel colossus, but because of frame death when the game can't keep computing the next step at a reasonable pace, and the #1 cost to the CPU is almost always pathfinding. i can only imagine trying to pathfind for over a million cims must require unimaginable optimization.
There are actually a few games that have millions or billions of sims, you can do a lot with less optimization than you think. Look at the tricks satisfactory uses for example.
@@MegaLokopo The difference is the scope of the individual agents... games that can run with millions or billions have very little to calculate for each agent... games like CS2 have a pretty high compute load per agent... games like DF have a MASSIVE load per agent. Comparing a single agent from something like satisfactory to an agent in games like DF is kinda silly.
@@MacroAggressor Yes that is true, but there are short cuts you can take to make processing more agents even on an individual level much easier. I wasn't comparing the agent themselves just the short cuts in processing. In satisfactory anything far away enough from the player, stops moving with physics and teleports along the path it is moving. The same thing could apply to cities skylines, the agents could stop calculating everything they normally do, and just periodically teleport further down their paths. I'm talking about vehicles in satisfactory not items on conveyor belts.
5:00 30FPS at ground level ... wouldn't matter if it was running at 240fps if the simulation is so slow it takes hours in real life to build a building. Just look at the sims, it will take them half an hour to walk a block in the city. Back in CS1 you were tracking a cyclist from one side of the map to the other in realtime.
I was insanely surprised when i was watching linus and they mentioned you, that just show that you are probably one of the greatest city skylines player out there 🥳🥳
Hard to believe someone has gotten to the 1mil mark for population. But something tells me, after seeing this city, Biffa would want to show massive improvements to it... 🍵
@@malibu4255 I think they are more common in the Detroit and Down River areas of the State, i lived in Alpena, Lansing and Tawas and they don't have Michigan lefts.
It would be interesting to come back to this save in a video a year from now to see if the devs did any major sim speed optimizations. KSP2 was also very low sim speed on launch, but they really did a ton of performance improvements over the last few patches.
Biffa I’d love to see a series of you reviewing your own old cities videos. For example I’ve been watching Kerrisdale from 2018, and I’d love to hear your current thoughts on using 6-way 1 way roads, putting industry in the middle residential… your style of playing has evolved so much and it would be very entertaining to hear your commentary on it
I had this issue when I reached 80k residents with a very basic entry level PC, I like this game so much that I've been pricing a new CPU,GPU and RAM. After watching this video and the one featured on LTT, I've decided to stop playing Cities 2 outright until it's be fixed. If the best CPU's on the market, ones out of the reach of the normal consumer, can't even run this game, I don't see the point in continuing to play.
This is the extreme top-end of the games simulation. This is the top of the curve. The incline of the curve until this point is what will change depending on your PC specs. A better test of performance gains from top-end CPUs would be something like 80-100k population city (at least from what I've seen/heard around the community).
@@Red-Tower I reached 80k residents after just a week of play. If I wanted to continue building, and who wouldn't, with ANY PC on the market, you will reach a point where the game becomes unplayable. The amount of time and effort to build a city up for it to just become unplayable is inexcusable.
I loved seeing you mentioned out of nowhere while watching LTT! I wish they turned motion blur off and tweaked the settings, it would have looked so much better in their video.
imagine a matrix movie where the MC is aware as the world's time stood still because the matrix is running out of resources for having too many things running at the same time. witnessing peoples, buildings, cars suddenly disappear and pop back up again
I wonder if CO can put an option setting that allows us to limit total population in the game. This way if we want to create or test a large city we can set a limit so the sims will play nice with the big city. This setting would be especially nice for those of us who like designing big cities vs managing the sims and economy.
It's a nice idea but I feel like they would either have to implement some kind of "fake population cim" to get the rest of the simulation to scale correctly, or you just end up reaching a weird wall where suddenly nothing in your city changes and all of your demand and economy flatlines.
this is amazing that LTT and Biffa end up having a connection like this. I do hope there are more connected videos over time, especially with how systems run.
I could never get CS1 to work beyond about 100k without it becoming too slow. I haven’t reached that limit in CS2 because I find I lose interest. Without mods and assets it is hard to get motivated. I know that mods exist but it’s too early at the moment. I’m hoping the workshop will be opened soon and then we can really get going again.
When I heard Collab, I thought RCE. Hoping for some Efficient Engineering, and Strongest Shaped City....*sigh* one day... I got computer engineers, which is quite interesting, so all involved earned a cuppa tea. 😉
It sure looks like they made a tiny mistake on the simulation resolution. As soon as you're getting individual people on screen, it appears that they are simulating all cims at that resolution. If they would only simulate the items in actual view (so not just viewing angle, but also ignore all obscured instances), they should have such a drastic change in game tick speed when zooming in. No point calculating the limbs of a cim that's too far to ever be seen... We don't want Truman Show effects either, and I know they are using detail depth levels, so I think it's just a tiny error that they'll easily fix now that somebody ran into it.
Why do you talk about FPS when you see with your own eyes that pretty much nothing is moving. Your graphics card is fine, this game is limited by its CPU usage.
2:13 Hey, there is my City: Salchen... the one, that broke both the "fix my City for CSII"-series and Biffas will to fix my city ;) Btw, biffa, you never send me the fixed city back
Watching the thread ripper struggle with CS2 yesterday was a big oof. I'm a pretty staunch defender of the game, but even i have to admit that FPS is irrelevant when you are forced to run at 15-25% sim speed. That's near enough to "unplayable" as you will get.
When using dev mode, you can crank up the sim speed to 8x. Default max is 4x. There is detailed stats for cpu usage with dev mode also. Even vegetation can effect sim speed and cpu usage, which is why there's an Adult Only Tree's mod.
Yes that's the speed the game runs at, but when it's pushed by a 1 Million city it doesn't matter how fast you TRY to run it, it'll be extremely slow at that size 👍 You can also crank to x8 in the cinematic mode and it'll stay at x8 when you exit back to the game.
At 03:12 you can see this map's owner has 3-4 high schools all grouped together, rather unrealistically which leads me to believe other essential services, education, fire, police are also lumped together in one huge service area, which is why we are seeing the ambulance, crematory, high rents, and other general heads-up notifications all over the map. I'm sure it's the same with this maps public transportation. It's great to use this map for bench marking purposes but other than that this is really not the way CS2 was intended to be played.
A city builder game should be able to run 60 fps+ with atleast 2 million people. This game was made with city building in mind with the building models based on bigger cities, yet you won’t pass 500k without problems.
Love playing my simulation games at 1/16th speed and being palmed off by the devs that it's acceptable. At this point how much will optimisations even help
I am not sure about simulations. Just stating the cities I had in CS1 with the mods and all expansions never had the performance issues that I have on a similar size city that they’re using on CS2. It’s not really measuring apples to apples… but,as far as an end user experience goes this is not the performance out come one would hope for large city in CS2. I give it more time before I try playing it again. 13900k 64g 4070ti 1t nvme and still not great with minimal settings. Like Biffa said that it has good foundation… so in time it will be more enjoyable to play when closer towards end game population achievements. But, at current status of the game we will never be able to build using all buyable squares. 😢
to be fair, a 4090 is really only meant to be paired with HEDT CPUs, even then the best GPU to pair with a 5800X3D is a 3080TI or 3090TI if your doing 8K VR or loads of Accelerated Compute. the 30FPS here is because the 4090 is carrying you while you are extremely CPU bound.
This is complete nonsense - a _12600K_ doesn't even bottleneck a 4090. If anything, the reduced clock speeds and insane core counts on HEDT chips might make a 4090 perform _worse_ considering most games will never use more than 8 CPU cores and rely much more heavily on single-threaded performance. The vast majority of GPU workloads wont come close to utilizing an 8 core CPU. I'm not sure what you think the 4090 is for, but it's a gaming graphics card. It's not just games though - look at an Cycles OptiX benchmark with a 4090 and an HEDT chip vs a 4090 and a desktop chip; it makes zero meaningful difference.
@@theftking And that is where the bottleneck lies, single-threaded performance. Games may seem to not be bottlenecked, but they actually are by some component in your system, typically your CPU or GPU. There is not a system that is "bottleneck-free", but there are ones that have a desirable performance level while bottlenecked. Higher end GPUs almost always run at a CPU bind, since they can process more than the CPU can throw at it unless the game assigns more than 2 working render threads.
c:s 2 is just a big disappointment for me. all i wanted was a city builder with upgrades to c:s like bigger map, bigger population and better pathfinding mechanics. i guess i'll just continue to play the old game with mods.
Wouldn't be the first time that Linus lies right out the bat, he usually does that either because he is just a lier or because he doesn't care to do the propper research before saying bullsh*t.
I'm running a 7950X with an Asus ROG Strix 4090 OC with 64GB of RAM and even my 200K pop cities chug a little at ground level. I'm still getting 30-40fps so it's not a framerate issue. I'm very much convinced it's a pathing issue. Each agent in the sim figuring out their paths and no real optimization for translating all that. Honestly they should have done shader based pathing on the GPU but I don't even know if the engine is capable of that and I can understand the desire for large scale visuals might have prioritized doing the simulation on the CPU.
What's crazy is that even though the 5800x3d isn't the king it used to be, it is still showing up in the charts with current high end CPUs, especially for gaming workloads. It may have been replaced at the top, but its still within about 10%-20% of the current best CPUs. I don't think an extra 20% performance is going to help the simulation speed for this file much.
Biffa, I've been watching your videos since January 2020. Thanks for making them, I can't really play the game anymore. I don't have the time but I enjoy watching your videos.
It’s more like you abandon a city after it reaches a certain size, before the traffic becomes worse and worse. I’ve always wanted to watch you fill up the 81 tiles, but I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen.
I mean if you assume that simulation speed is related to how quickly the people and cars are doing their pathfinding on the map it's pretty clear to see that while Biffa's system is obviously not crashing, it's also running at a fraction the speed of that LTT system. Which, I mean... 8 cores vs 96. That tracks. Linus seems to have just been assuming the game wouldn't be able to scale the simulation elements down as well as it does.
Thanks for sharing this! I was actually able to launch this city on my MacBook Pro M1 Max 32GB through compatibility layer (Whisky and GPTK) and got similar result - about 15-25 FPS and a bit slower simulation speed (no mods). Of course my graphic settings are lower than yours :) Hope for a native version someday... When it comes to simulation speed it looks to correlate the most with pathfinding efficiency (which besides pathfinding includes looking for jobs, industry selling products, commercial buying products). Taxi tends to make pathfinding efficiency worse - especially if you allow to drive from anywhere to anywhere. Goods flowing from industry to commercial is another efficiency bummer in such cities as we are not able to put warehouses manually - they spawn by the game as industry zoning which is a shame as they don't pollute and you want to put them in right place... Graph edge count is also quite important - this is basically the network of everything in our city, which makes it so that building tall is more efficient than wide. There is a thread at the paradox forum with a player that runs a city which is now 1.3 mil big. Depending on what the player does (optimize roads, zone, increase public transport options to reduce cars) the sim speed varies from 2 to 8 seconds per in-game minute which is a huge deal. Reduction of graph edge count was a particularly huge deal which improved performance (a whole sector of roads was destroyed).
Something I noticed from day 1 is how due to people walking across all the roads, everybody always have traffic issues. The thing I keep wondering, is there a way to run all the pedestrian paths underground so they don't take up so much land above aground, and so in your face. I guess what I'm asking, can you please try a city that is pedestrian friendly, but make it look good and functional all underground.
What I haven't seen Biffaplay is a 1 million in City:Skylines. Would be great to see how both compare on his rig since I get better movement than he's getting in 2 on a 64gb 10875H.
I think Ill have to try this 1 mill city when I've got my 7800x3d upgrade. hopefully it'll show some improvement over your 5800 and I already have a 4090 so it might tell you if its worth the upgrade as well. Ill post my results on your Discord and ill also look at the difference with OBS running as that might cause some extra stress on the system.
Most of the complainers seemply don't realise how much is being calculated at 1,000,000 cims, with vehicles, trees and simulation. They want MORE! I have in the past suggested they get a mainframe :)
Or maybe they should release a game that works with majority of PCs that people have ? instead of simulating dogs and their shadows and poops that no one can run in years ahead. we are talking about top end PCs here, no one cares about half of the simulations that are heppening in this game, when you can't run the damn thing you can't have fun.
@@0A01amir Well times and specs change. You got to upgrade evntually - I guess it's the curse of PC gaming; always a faster card required, always a new CPU/motherboard. It is what it is. :)
@@stevekirkby6570 Well you are seeing the game's awful performance on top end PCs, devs apologized for the broken filth they released, maybe we should stop supporting these practices or you know paying 2k a year to upgrade parts of our PCs to overcome developers laziness.
You ARE maxing your cpu. if your gpu isn't at 100% your cpu is the bottleneck. just one core is telling other cores what to do. and stuff like that can cause bottlenecks.
I upgraded my cpu from a 5600x to a 5800x3d just for CS2. I thought it was going to make a bigger difference on the simulation speed. Still, I'm glad I upgraded it because it makes the difference on other games.
Having the same town in City skylines 1 would be interesting. While not as graphically demanding it's clear that the simulation is the bottleneck. And how it would compare to the previous version. Would also give a rough estimate how much it could be improved by the devs as the simulation in city skylines 1 was also pretty advanced
I didn't realize we basically have the same specs computer wise. Well, same CPU and RAM for sure. Willing to bet my 3070 doesn't hold up compared to a 4090 (though still great for 1440p gaming)
This video gets me thinking, "Should I feel like I'm waiting for somebody who could get DOOM to run on anything to get CS2 running on a QUANTUM computer?"
Theoretically they should be able to optimize a helluva lot more, considering the game is based on Unity DOTS, the problem is now just optimization, not the engine.
I had been wondering if really the CPU is the bottleneck so this is very interesting to see. I can only imagine this is the kind of problem that a team of computer scientists could spend years, and a huge amount of money, trying to fix let alone a small game dev studio trying to juggle making a game fun, be approachable, look good, and be able to build/change anything at a whim. Not saying we should forgive the issues but it just doesn't feel like a simple solution is to be had short of turning the game into a joyless hands-off sim.
I imagine what's happening is all the citizens are being simulated on many different threads which is why you can still move the camera around even when other things are moving really slow. Then as all the different threads happen and finish their tasks this must be where the dip in CPU usage happens as they pass their results back to the main thread of the game Then the game freezes at this point as all the final processing of all those tasks has to happen on the main thread as it is using Unity Game engine. But because of that the game freezes for a split second whilst it handles all that data and updates all the actual entities within the game.
Thanks for the shoutout Linus & Alex, was a great surpise! Hope everyone enjoys this response and let's not all get bent out of shape because Linus said "crashed"...at 1fps it may as well have! Although it wasn'ty always 1 fps! Enjoy the video and the fun 🙂
Only time I have disliked a Biffa video, due to Linus being on it.
Well you know how it is. If Linus says something, it's always good to first put it to an actual expert like Gamers Nexus to see if it can be done.
The bottle neck here seems to be the simulation speed, not the video rendering. Simulation speed is driven by CPU power and I think you would see a noticeable improvement to your game speed if you went for an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X or AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, which of course would also require you to upgrade your motherboard and your RAM (to DDR5, from your current DDR4). That would double your cores, but would set you back about US$800 - US$1000 with the processor, motherboard and RAM.
whats wrong with linus?@@bigsoopsshorts4599
@@nvelsen1975Nah, most people don't want to hear from scumbags.
The issue is Pathfinding. All of those agents (citizens) need to valuate their path. Also they need to update their positions in the world. It is just limit of basic stuff that hardly can be done in conventional ways. Grats to the devs that it is able to use the CPU at 100% taking to the fact how many changes to paths can happen at any moment.
Be interesting to see if eventually it can use even more cores and use them well.
@@BiffaPlaysCitiesSkylines IN THEORY :D that should accelerate the game even more, but than in practicality I dont think the game is even optimized to do such a task. You see, there is the problem that even if you can increase max core usage (which may not be an issue as I would assume its just hardcoded limit in the code and it is designed to be expandable easily) than you will meet an issue of synchronizing all the threads (code run on a core) to get the solution on time. All the threads need to be synced at one point to update everything and than the results need to be processed, often on main thread (main loop of the game) to get consistent game tick (one frame). You could increase from current limit of 64 threads (cores) to 128 and get only 20% speed increase for example ... In case of rendering like benchmarks it is bit different because each of the cores renders piece of the screen and it does not matter if they all are displayed at the same time, so you save lots of time on synchronization. Its rather complicated thing to do for a game :D Im getting sweaty when I even only think about it and im Game Dev Programmer :D
There does appear to be some sort of curve to it. My city of ~550k runs on a 5900x and you would think that with double the pop it would take double the cpu but it is clearly using way more than double for this 1mil city. I think we will see a lot more performance over time as they update the game.
congrats to the dev? lmao, scammy ass devs releasing an early access game at a full price
This is correct. You've the same issue to some extent with GIS databases. What hogs it is calculating the sheer amount of lines you're putting on.
Your computer can easily handle files of 150 mb, and open a movie of 2 gb easily, but if I give you a 40 mb map of a municipality in all its details it's going to bring your computer to a screeching halt for seconds.
I watched the LTT video yesterday when it was only a few minutes old. I was rather surprised to see you get name dropped so casually like that.
So was I lol 😆
@@BiffaPlaysCitiesSkylinesThe big leagues now! 🫡
I love when my UA-cam worlds collide.
It felt a bit like that yesterday for me tbh! :-)
Came here to say this. I always giggle whenever Real Civil Engineer mentions Biffa. Like recently when RCE created himself a traffic problem and wondered if Biffa could fix it. Problem is that RCE has a tendency to include… not-all-age-appropriate content. But it was hilarious. 😂
Dude same
Wish it happened before Linus got into controversy for faking and rushing vids...
Been happening a lot in the last year.
Love it.
Love collabs like this, though they should build you a PC that looks like a skyscraper next :p
Now that would be cool! :-)
Or make a PC case that looks like a roundabout!
maybe some dedicated lanes too, one in one out :D
@@maximss Dedicated PCIe lanes
Better yet, build him a custom server that looks like a mini city
Cities Skylines 2, The only game you need to build additional computers along with your city...
a dwarf fortress player could have predicted this for CO. a lot of forts die not because they're overrun by serpent men, or a goblin army, or a steel colossus, but because of frame death when the game can't keep computing the next step at a reasonable pace, and the #1 cost to the CPU is almost always pathfinding. i can only imagine trying to pathfind for over a million cims must require unimaginable optimization.
There are actually a few games that have millions or billions of sims, you can do a lot with less optimization than you think. Look at the tricks satisfactory uses for example.
@@MegaLokopo The difference is the scope of the individual agents... games that can run with millions or billions have very little to calculate for each agent... games like CS2 have a pretty high compute load per agent... games like DF have a MASSIVE load per agent. Comparing a single agent from something like satisfactory to an agent in games like DF is kinda silly.
@@MacroAggressor Yes that is true, but there are short cuts you can take to make processing more agents even on an individual level much easier. I wasn't comparing the agent themselves just the short cuts in processing. In satisfactory anything far away enough from the player, stops moving with physics and teleports along the path it is moving. The same thing could apply to cities skylines, the agents could stop calculating everything they normally do, and just periodically teleport further down their paths. I'm talking about vehicles in satisfactory not items on conveyor belts.
You should try this again when the devs are finished optimizing the game to see the difference
I certainly will 👍
When is that? 😂
@@TigerWon maybe in another year when it's out of early access
so we playing a beta then? i hate the meta of unfinished unpolished games
@@FrazzaJ2000it’s not in early access
Without that mod sim speed was 0.05-0.2, with it you got a consistent 0.3-0.5. It might be worth looking into more on a regular city 👀
yeah, adding dummy traffix and people is stupid, i jsut want people form my city
You people are hilarious. 😂
This was a fun video, with barely any collaborating, just clips. Just enjoy Biffas content, no need to bring others down.
Indeed! Thankyou 😅
5:00 30FPS at ground level ... wouldn't matter if it was running at 240fps if the simulation is so slow it takes hours in real life to build a building. Just look at the sims, it will take them half an hour to walk a block in the city. Back in CS1 you were tracking a cyclist from one side of the map to the other in realtime.
WELL SAID : ((((
Unplayable movement speed is stuck at very slow pace
I was insanely surprised when i was watching linus and they mentioned you, that just show that you are probably one of the greatest city skylines player out there 🥳🥳
It was a surprise to me to lol :-)
Hard to believe someone has gotten to the 1mil mark for population. But something tells me, after seeing this city, Biffa would want to show massive improvements to it... 🍵
I would love the game to run well enough that I could fix anything over 150K without leaving the game running for hours for things to happen lol :-)
5:00 "is that a big fail?" Yes, yes it is! 😄 Not really a game at this stage. But them a million is crazy number to manage.
Unplayable movement speed this is stuck at very slow pace
Biffa, can you try a Michigan left in your next traffic fix? Now that mods let you do it correctly I'd like to know if it actually works.
Nice idea! :-)
I live in Michigan and hated learning how to drive with those lefts.
HAHAH! I remember these from living in Saugatuck!
What is a michigan left? Lived in michigan my whole life, didn't know this was a thing.
@@malibu4255 I think they are more common in the Detroit and Down River areas of the State, i lived in Alpena, Lansing and Tawas and they don't have Michigan lefts.
It would be interesting to come back to this save in a video a year from now to see if the devs did any major sim speed optimizations. KSP2 was also very low sim speed on launch, but they really did a ton of performance improvements over the last few patches.
Biffa I’d love to see a series of you reviewing your own old cities videos. For example I’ve been watching Kerrisdale from 2018, and I’d love to hear your current thoughts on using 6-way 1 way roads, putting industry in the middle residential… your style of playing has evolved so much and it would be very entertaining to hear your commentary on it
I had this issue when I reached 80k residents with a very basic entry level PC, I like this game so much that I've been pricing a new CPU,GPU and RAM.
After watching this video and the one featured on LTT, I've decided to stop playing Cities 2 outright until it's be fixed. If the best CPU's on the market, ones out of the reach of the normal consumer, can't even run this game, I don't see the point in continuing to play.
This is the extreme top-end of the games simulation. This is the top of the curve. The incline of the curve until this point is what will change depending on your PC specs. A better test of performance gains from top-end CPUs would be something like 80-100k population city (at least from what I've seen/heard around the community).
@@Red-Tower I reached 80k residents after just a week of play. If I wanted to continue building, and who wouldn't, with ANY PC on the market, you will reach a point where the game becomes unplayable. The amount of time and effort to build a city up for it to just become unplayable is inexcusable.
Glad to know all I need to run this game as the devs intended is a PC that cost £10k-15k or a small server farm😂
AGREE : (((((((((((((((
I love how when you clicked remove residents and vehicles it left a buch of dogs wandering around XD
I loved seeing you mentioned out of nowhere while watching LTT! I wish they turned motion blur off and tweaked the settings, it would have looked so much better in their video.
It will be fantastic when cities skylines 2 runs as well as cities skylines 1, it is only a matter of time.
The code is such a mess that it's unlikely to ever happen.
@@ZenAndPsychedelicHealingCenter The code can be fixed, most of it is pretty good, it is sadly the important stuff that is bad.
AGREE : )))))))))
imagine a matrix movie where the MC is aware as the world's time stood still because the matrix is running out of resources for having too many things running at the same time.
witnessing peoples, buildings, cars suddenly disappear and pop back up again
seing videos like this I am honestly wondering what CO was doing during production and testing...
I wonder if CO can put an option setting that allows us to limit total population in the game. This way if we want to create or test a large city we can set a limit so the sims will play nice with the big city. This setting would be especially nice for those of us who like designing big cities vs managing the sims and economy.
It's a nice idea but I feel like they would either have to implement some kind of "fake population cim" to get the rest of the simulation to scale correctly, or you just end up reaching a weird wall where suddenly nothing in your city changes and all of your demand and economy flatlines.
I saw that video today and I was like, ooh ooh I follow that guy haha
Yay! :-)
this is amazing that LTT and Biffa end up having a connection like this. I do hope there are more connected videos over time, especially with how systems run.
I was shocked when I saw that you were featured on ltt i was blown away good job biffa
So was I, had no clue 😅
This is a Collab I would of never thought I would see lmao. Great video biffa!
Glad you enjoyed!
This is the new Crysis. Fun times haha
Hopefully they fix it soon!
I could never get CS1 to work beyond about 100k without it becoming too slow. I haven’t reached that limit in CS2 because I find I lose interest. Without mods and assets it is hard to get motivated. I know that mods exist but it’s too early at the moment. I’m hoping the workshop will be opened soon and then we can really get going again.
Nice unexpected collab! A bit annoyed how linus is still getting information wrong after his 'pledge', but oh well...
I think it was more tongue in cheek for the video 😁
Is City Skylines 2 the new Crisis?
I hate this sequel, Paradox should be ashamed of releasing this game in this state.
I just love with my UA-cam subscriptions overlap.
When I heard Collab, I thought RCE. Hoping for some Efficient Engineering, and Strongest Shaped City....*sigh* one day...
I got computer engineers, which is quite interesting, so all involved earned a cuppa tea. 😉
Usually games are not CPU heavy but cities skylines seems to be just that
There is a LOT of simulation going on in the background 👍
It sure looks like they made a tiny mistake on the simulation resolution. As soon as you're getting individual people on screen, it appears that they are simulating all cims at that resolution. If they would only simulate the items in actual view (so not just viewing angle, but also ignore all obscured instances), they should have such a drastic change in game tick speed when zooming in. No point calculating the limbs of a cim that's too far to ever be seen... We don't want Truman Show effects either, and I know they are using detail depth levels, so I think it's just a tiny error that they'll easily fix now that somebody ran into it.
Why do you talk about FPS when you see with your own eyes that pretty much nothing is moving. Your graphics card is fine, this game is limited by its CPU usage.
Look the screen saver picture changed! It's totally playable!
2:13 Hey, there is my City: Salchen... the one, that broke both the "fix my City for CSII"-series and Biffas will to fix my city ;)
Btw, biffa, you never send me the fixed city back
It was! As you saw in my fix video it didn't get really fixed as the game runs so bad I couldn't do all the stuff I wanted to do :-)
1:12
"May be lost in translation there"
Yes, translating British to Canadian is hard we can all agree with that
Watching the thread ripper struggle with CS2 yesterday was a big oof. I'm a pretty staunch defender of the game, but even i have to admit that FPS is irrelevant when you are forced to run at 15-25% sim speed. That's near enough to "unplayable" as you will get.
When using dev mode, you can crank up the sim speed to 8x. Default max is 4x. There is detailed stats for cpu usage with dev mode also. Even vegetation can effect sim speed and cpu usage, which is why there's an Adult Only Tree's mod.
Yes that's the speed the game runs at, but when it's pushed by a 1 Million city it doesn't matter how fast you TRY to run it, it'll be extremely slow at that size 👍
You can also crank to x8 in the cinematic mode and it'll stay at x8 when you exit back to the game.
I like how "remove residents/vehicles" doesn't despawn the dogs (see 8:15)
At 03:12 you can see this map's owner has 3-4 high schools all grouped together, rather unrealistically which leads me to believe other essential services, education, fire, police are also lumped together in one huge service area, which is why we are seeing the ambulance, crematory, high rents, and other general heads-up notifications all over the map. I'm sure it's the same with this maps public transportation. It's great to use this map for bench marking purposes but other than that this is really not the way CS2 was intended to be played.
i was so confused seeing linus' face and the cities skylines biffa font style
Looks similar to my system running the city I built with 420k+ population. Same CPU, 6950 XT, 64GB RAM.
A city builder game should be able to run 60 fps+ with atleast 2 million people. This game was made with city building in mind with the building models based on bigger cities, yet you won’t pass 500k without problems.
Love playing my simulation games at 1/16th speed and being palmed off by the devs that it's acceptable. At this point how much will optimisations even help
I am not sure about simulations. Just stating the cities I had in CS1 with the mods and all expansions never had the performance issues that I have on a similar size city that they’re using on CS2. It’s not really measuring apples to apples… but,as far as an end user experience goes this is not the performance out come one would hope for large city in CS2. I give it more time before I try playing it again. 13900k 64g 4070ti 1t nvme and still not great with minimal settings. Like Biffa said that it has good foundation… so in time it will be more enjoyable to play when closer towards end game population achievements. But, at current status of the game we will never be able to build using all buyable squares. 😢
to be fair, a 4090 is really only meant to be paired with HEDT CPUs, even then the best GPU to pair with a 5800X3D is a 3080TI or 3090TI if your doing 8K VR or loads of Accelerated Compute. the 30FPS here is because the 4090 is carrying you while you are extremely CPU bound.
This is complete nonsense - a _12600K_ doesn't even bottleneck a 4090. If anything, the reduced clock speeds and insane core counts on HEDT chips might make a 4090 perform _worse_ considering most games will never use more than 8 CPU cores and rely much more heavily on single-threaded performance.
The vast majority of GPU workloads wont come close to utilizing an 8 core CPU. I'm not sure what you think the 4090 is for, but it's a gaming graphics card.
It's not just games though - look at an Cycles OptiX benchmark with a 4090 and an HEDT chip vs a 4090 and a desktop chip; it makes zero meaningful difference.
@@theftking And that is where the bottleneck lies, single-threaded performance. Games may seem to not be bottlenecked, but they actually are by some component in your system, typically your CPU or GPU. There is not a system that is "bottleneck-free", but there are ones that have a desirable performance level while bottlenecked. Higher end GPUs almost always run at a CPU bind, since they can process more than the CPU can throw at it unless the game assigns more than 2 working render threads.
c:s 2 is just a big disappointment for me. all i wanted was a city builder with upgrades to c:s like bigger map, bigger population and better pathfinding mechanics. i guess i'll just continue to play the old game with mods.
Wouldn't be the first time that Linus lies right out the bat, he usually does that either because he is just a lier or because he doesn't care to do the propper research before saying bullsh*t.
I'm running a 7950X with an Asus ROG Strix 4090 OC with 64GB of RAM and even my 200K pop cities chug a little at ground level. I'm still getting 30-40fps so it's not a framerate issue. I'm very much convinced it's a pathing issue. Each agent in the sim figuring out their paths and no real optimization for translating all that. Honestly they should have done shader based pathing on the GPU but I don't even know if the engine is capable of that and I can understand the desire for large scale visuals might have prioritized doing the simulation on the CPU.
Imagine LTT being wrong on a tech review lol
From my experience the cleanup obsolete entities helps quite a bit.
that traffic mod saved me for a while
this game utilizes the finest of spaghetti coding
Interesting video. Haven’t played in while. Got to work on those mods.
You didn't get a big performance boost because the parts you upgraded to aren't that much faster than the ones you already had...
Biffa getting better fps on 4k and that city, than i get on 1080p like 10-20k people or so.
man dont let the tech community see that he called out the wrong channel on screen xD
9:00 The "Rather Pink" building LUL
What's crazy is that even though the 5800x3d isn't the king it used to be, it is still showing up in the charts with current high end CPUs, especially for gaming workloads. It may have been replaced at the top, but its still within about 10%-20% of the current best CPUs. I don't think an extra 20% performance is going to help the simulation speed for this file much.
YES. BEST CROSSOVER SINCE JIMMY NEUTRON AND TIMMY TURNER.
😅
This city combined with the mass Exodus mod is probably a very fun time
I love watching all the people in the closeup moving slower than the Six Million Dollar Man
😅
Biffa, I've been watching your videos since January 2020. Thanks for making them, I can't really play the game anymore. I don't have the time but I enjoy watching your videos.
Glad you like them! Thankyou 😁👍
My takeaway here: if we want to use this game for benchmarking or showing off performance, display the tic menu instead of the FPS.
I wanna see someone turn this city into a 'where's Waldo?' Live search game
It’s more like you abandon a city after it reaches a certain size, before the traffic becomes worse and worse.
I’ve always wanted to watch you fill up the 81 tiles, but I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen.
I mean if you assume that simulation speed is related to how quickly the people and cars are doing their pathfinding on the map it's pretty clear to see that while Biffa's system is obviously not crashing, it's also running at a fraction the speed of that LTT system. Which, I mean... 8 cores vs 96. That tracks. Linus seems to have just been assuming the game wouldn't be able to scale the simulation elements down as well as it does.
Glad to see biffa has grown so much
👍😁
Wow. Amazing collab! Thank you!
Thank you too! 😁
Need this to be put out as a benchmark. Kind of would like to test it on my 2990wx with 256GB ram
You dared to use a Nvidia GC, with a AMD processor? I though you were a TRUE gamer :D
Thanks for sharing this!
I was actually able to launch this city on my MacBook Pro M1 Max 32GB through compatibility layer (Whisky and GPTK) and got similar result - about 15-25 FPS and a bit slower simulation speed (no mods). Of course my graphic settings are lower than yours :) Hope for a native version someday...
When it comes to simulation speed it looks to correlate the most with pathfinding efficiency (which besides pathfinding includes looking for jobs, industry selling products, commercial buying products). Taxi tends to make pathfinding efficiency worse - especially if you allow to drive from anywhere to anywhere. Goods flowing from industry to commercial is another efficiency bummer in such cities as we are not able to put warehouses manually - they spawn by the game as industry zoning which is a shame as they don't pollute and you want to put them in right place... Graph edge count is also quite important - this is basically the network of everything in our city, which makes it so that building tall is more efficient than wide.
There is a thread at the paradox forum with a player that runs a city which is now 1.3 mil big. Depending on what the player does (optimize roads, zone, increase public transport options to reduce cars) the sim speed varies from 2 to 8 seconds per in-game minute which is a huge deal. Reduction of graph edge count was a particularly huge deal which improved performance (a whole sector of roads was destroyed).
Something I noticed from day 1 is how due to people walking across all the roads, everybody always have traffic issues.
The thing I keep wondering, is there a way to run all the pedestrian paths underground so they don't take up so much land above aground, and so in your face.
I guess what I'm asking, can you please try a city that is pedestrian friendly, but make it look good and functional all underground.
Now that we have this as a benchmark, I wonder how much better it would run on the lowest settings
looks very much like a close up of a PCB
What I haven't seen Biffaplay is a 1 million in City:Skylines.
Would be great to see how both compare on his rig since I get better movement than he's getting in 2 on a 64gb 10875H.
I think Ill have to try this 1 mill city when I've got my 7800x3d upgrade. hopefully it'll show some improvement over your 5800 and I already have a 4090 so it might tell you if its worth the upgrade as well. Ill post my results on your Discord and ill also look at the difference with OBS running as that might cause some extra stress on the system.
Would love to know how you get on :-)
Just waiting for Scan get the motherboard in and shipped to me. I'll only have 64gb of ram but that shouldn't make much difference.
Why are they making games that not even the "best" hardware cant handle, wtf?!
Most of the complainers seemply don't realise how much is being calculated at 1,000,000 cims, with vehicles, trees and simulation. They want MORE! I have in the past suggested they get a mainframe :)
Lol, I would love a mainframe! But I agree :-)
Or maybe they should release a game that works with majority of PCs that people have ? instead of simulating dogs and their shadows and poops that no one can run in years ahead. we are talking about top end PCs here, no one cares about half of the simulations that are heppening in this game, when you can't run the damn thing you can't have fun.
@@0A01amir Well times and specs change. You got to upgrade evntually - I guess it's the curse of PC gaming; always a faster card required, always a new CPU/motherboard. It is what it is. :)
@@stevekirkby6570 Well you are seeing the game's awful performance on top end PCs, devs apologized for the broken filth they released, maybe we should stop supporting these practices or you know paying 2k a year to upgrade parts of our PCs to overcome developers laziness.
You ARE maxing your cpu. if your gpu isn't at 100% your cpu is the bottleneck. just one core is telling other cores what to do. and stuff like that can cause bottlenecks.
Biffa threadripper build coming up soon 😂
I upgraded my cpu from a 5600x to a 5800x3d just for CS2. I thought it was going to make a bigger difference on the simulation speed. Still, I'm glad I upgraded it because it makes the difference on other games.
Having the same town in City skylines 1 would be interesting. While not as graphically demanding it's clear that the simulation is the bottleneck. And how it would compare to the previous version.
Would also give a rough estimate how much it could be improved by the devs as the simulation in city skylines 1 was also pretty advanced
Im pretty sure somebody made a 1mil city in cs1 but it was edge to edge with high density. Cs1 didn't really alow for cities that big
So many users make one million pop city
Main difference is CS1 has an agent limit so no matter the size, there can only be a certain amount of cims/vehicles collectively
I didn't realize we basically have the same specs computer wise. Well, same CPU and RAM for sure. Willing to bet my 3070 doesn't hold up compared to a 4090 (though still great for 1440p gaming)
Yes, it's only 150% more powerful 😄 (So definitely overkill for 1440P, as you say)
This video gets me thinking, "Should I feel like I'm waiting for somebody who could get DOOM to run on anything to get CS2 running on a QUANTUM computer?"
Good to know LTT still has issues getting the correct information into their videos.
name drop from Linus is crazy!!
It was!!! :-)
Theoretically they should be able to optimize a helluva lot more, considering the game is based on Unity DOTS, the problem is now just optimization, not the engine.
I had been wondering if really the CPU is the bottleneck so this is very interesting to see. I can only imagine this is the kind of problem that a team of computer scientists could spend years, and a huge amount of money, trying to fix let alone a small game dev studio trying to juggle making a game fun, be approachable, look good, and be able to build/change anything at a whim. Not saying we should forgive the issues but it just doesn't feel like a simple solution is to be had short of turning the game into a joyless hands-off sim.
Nice to see LTT's fact checking has improved /s
🤪
From fixing traffic jams to jamming CPU cores!
Well looks like its time for you to get a 7800x3d :P
And it'll have to be a new motherboard too 😬
Love seeing the game make a computer struggle to compute
I imagine what's happening is all the citizens are being simulated on many different threads which is why you can still move the camera around even when other things are moving really slow. Then as all the different threads happen and finish their tasks this must be where the dip in CPU usage happens as they pass their results back to the main thread of the game
Then the game freezes at this point as all the final processing of all those tasks has to happen on the main thread as it is using Unity Game engine.
But because of that the game freezes for a split second whilst it handles all that data and updates all the actual entities within the game.