The most annoying thing about the cities performance issues isn’t even the performance issues. It’s all the gamers who overnight became experts in game performance that are ranting and raving online about how they obviously know how to optimize games more than professionals. It’s so tiring at this point.
Any software engineer with real professional experience can tell you performance tuning is a nightmare. It’s going through millions of lines of code checking for places you can allocate memory a bit differently. Checking collections and going back to your CS classes to make sure you’re using the best data structures. Watching performance tools and debugging for hours on end to catch that one place that slows down a bit.
People here, Reddit, and everywhere are just so tiring because they act like it’s so obvious. “Oh it’s the teeth”. “If they would have done X”. It’s honestly just so disrespectful to the full time engineers who no doubt have had those thoughts months ago. If items like this were simple, they would have done them already.
I give completely respect to the engineers who worked on this, and I respect Colossal Order’s push to still release early. As someone who is enjoying the game, zero crashes, and in my opinion completely playable, I’m happy they released now.
They’ve been experts for longer than a single night, don’t you remember when all anybody said was to jUsT FiX tHe NeTcOdE!
I don’t work in games, but I do work in software and the people you describe are infuriating and have absolutely no idea what it’s like to work on a big piece of software. Thanks for the comment.
I give you right about those overnight experts in forums. 100% true. But I would not give too much respect to the developers (unless they were forced to released it early), because they knew the game was not ready to launch. It’s even their official statement: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/updates-on-modding-and-performance-for-cities-skylines-ii.1601865/
Cities: Skylines II is a next-gen title, and naturally, it demands certain hardware requirements. With that said, while our team has worked tirelessly to deliver the best experience possible, we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted.
Then why the hell do you release the game? So it’s another rushed game and that is you can blame the devs for. That is what upsets me personally the most from all those drama.
Then why the hell do you release the game?
because they are a business that needs to make money to offset development costs.
To be fair, one doesn’t have to be an automotive engineer to deduce something is wrong with a new car that struggles to reach 30km/h while most of the others exceed 100km/h with ease.
(This is the first I’ve heard of anyone blaming teeth, though. That’s a bit strange.)
There’s a big difference between looking at a game and saying there seem to be some performance issues versus baselessly pretending that you know what the specific cause of those issues is.
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That’s not a fair comparison. I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati, when they didn’t build a masarati. They built a van. I don’t need to go 100km/h, I needed something that could carry all of these items I have. And for me, that runs fine.
I will say that I have a new(ish) gaming rig, built about 3 years ago. I do think minimum requirements are jokingly out of date, and those needed to be upped to not mislead people. I don’t think even a 1000 series GTX card could play this on minimum settings, let alone a 900. It’s better PR just to be up front and say “Look, those cards just aren’t going to cut it. If you can’t play day one, we’re sorry, but we’re excited to see you at your next upgrade” rather than lie and say it’ll be fine.
That’s not a fair comparison.
I think it is. Note that I wrote 30km/h, not 200km/h. (In case you’re American, 30km/h is about 18mph.)
The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (at least with low-graphics settings) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware. Yet this one fails to do so even at the lowest possible settings.
Even Baldur’s Gate 3, despite being otherwise wonderful, has some glaring hit-and-miss performance issues (think 8 fps at 1080p) that show up on hardware that can handle similar games easily. You don’t need to be a software engineer to compare it to Divinity: Original Sin 2, adjust for a few years of hardware inflation, and have a rough idea of how it should perform at moderate-to-low settings.
I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati,
I don’t doubt that those people exist, but I believe they are outliers. Most of the complaints I see about underperforming games in the past year or so are from people with very reasonable expectations. If most of the gripes you’ve seen are from teeth-blaming Masarati-entitled loudmouths, I suspect it has more to do with the forums you frequent than anything else.
I mean, you kinda do, though. You have no idea what’s going on under the hood in Divinity versus Baldur’s Gate. Even if the graphics are similar and the UI looks the same, there could well be much more complex systems involved. Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
That game was just one example, but since you seem interested in singling it out:
Turn-based game rules cannot explain the awful graphics performance that game has, even at idle, on some systems. (Not even D&D 5e, which I happen to know in detail.)
Graphics engine enhancements might explain it, but in that case, the developers should have included options to disable those enhancements.
I haven’t reverse engineered the code, but some of the behaviors I’ve seen in that game smell strongly of decisions/mistakes that I would expect from a game that was rushed, such as lack of occlusion culling. Others smell like mistakes that are common among programmers who haven’t yet learned how to use the graphics APIs efficiently, such as rapid-fire operations that should instead be batched. Still others could be explained by poor texture and/or model scaling techniques. As a software engineer, the bad performance in this particular game looks like it could come from a combination of several different factors. None of them are new in this field. All of them can usually be avoided or mitigated.
In any case, the point is that none of that analysis matters for the sake of this discussion, because a community with experience using products doesn’t have to be experienced in building them in order to notice when something is wrong. It’s not fair to categorically dismiss their criticism.
(Thankfully, the Baldur’s Gate 3 developers haven’t dismissed it. Instead, they are working on improving it. Better late than never.)
The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (…) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware.
You cannot directly compare PC specs with those of a console. TLoU was made by Naughty Dog who are well known for squeezing absurd amounts or performance out of console hardware. The way to do this by leveraging a platforms specific strong points. The engine is very likely designed around the strengths of the console’s hardware.
PCs have a different architecture from consoles, with different trade-offs. For example: PCs are designed to be modular. You can replace graphics cards, processors, RAM, etc. This comes at a cost. One such cost is that a PC GPU has to have it’s own discrete RAM. There is a performance penalty to this. On a console things can be much more tightly integrated. I/O on a PS5 is a good example. It’s not just a fast SSD, it’s also a storage controller with more priority levels, it’s also a storage controller that interfaces directly with the GPU cache, etc.
Sigh… You conveniently deleted important parts of my comment, such as “at least with low-graphics settings” and “adjust for a few years of hardware inflation”, and completely ignored the fact that I am talking about cases of abnormally bad performance compared to entire categories of games. The straw man you’re arguing against is not what I wrote.
In Paradox defence they released a patch pretty quickly once it was released to the masses with miriad of different hardware configs.
To be honest, they prob should have just beta early released it.
This way they could have caveated any issues and allowed the feedback to refine the codebase.
£70 ish quid for the premium edition to run like shite takes the biscuit.
But yet if they released it Early Access to crowdsource their QA, people would have dogged all over them about “what’s with the EA bullshit, just release the full game when it’s finished”
Personally, I’m a huge fan of Early Access, I like playing 3/4 finished games and having actual tangible input on the finishing touches. It’s made several games that I already really liked in their EA state, into masterpieces.
But your average gamer just wants to buy a game and have it work perfectly. When it doesn’t, tantrums happen.
I used to hate early access - why should we pay to test an unfinished game, when that’s an actual job that people get paid to do?
but I’ve come to recognise that it’s am important avenue for funding for many developers, and tbh, I don’t think any of the early access games I’ve played have felt “incomplete” - perhaps lacking polish, perhaps in need of more content, but that’s true of many full releases, and early access not only gets you these games at a reduced price, it effectively guarantees a large amount of free DLC as the game gets made more complete.
my only real complaint now is sometimes I like early access features which end up getting cut from the finished game.
I feel like if they:
- released earlier with Beta: tantrums
- delayed to get perf up: tantrums
- cut features/details to get perf up: tantrums
- released on time w/perf issues: tantrums
I just ignore it. I have a fairly new setup and turned a few things down, so I can get 70 +/- 10 most of the time, but I trust they’re working on it so I can turn them back up later. Perf testing on a huge myriad of different system setups is hard to do. At least they didn’t pull a “here it is, we’re done.” Like some other groups might have. They acknowledged it, they announced the low perf and their continued work, and they released anyway so people who want it and can play it, get to.
It was a ridiculous claim to begin with, there’s no way they wouldn’t see something like that when analyzing with internal tools or doing any performance runs.
“… Characters feature a lot of details that, while seemingly unnecessary now, will become relevant in the future of the project.”
Custom Dentist Minigame DLC confirmed!
Either that, or “News Cameraman with Carnage Closeup Mode DLC”…
Did anyone read the quote. They literally stated this was part of the problem:
We know the characters require further work, as they are currently missing their LODs which affect some parts of performance. We are working on bringing these to the game along general LODs improvements across all game assets.
The teeth themselves seemed to have gotten confused in the article. Apparently someone was claiming the life cycle system is simulating tooth growth. The characters overall not being loded is an issue but only in GPU performance, not CPU. I don’t know where the major performance issues are on the side of since I’ve not touched the game but it’s why they say it’s not the whole issue and the article claims it’s not the teeth. Which it’s not. It’s the characters overall.
I think they run a lot of compute shader, so that they can offload part of the simulation to the GPU, so anything that reduces the utilization of the GPU could improve performance overall.
That’s still ignoring the whole character. Teeth aren’t the issue, it’s loding the character, you don’t do that just in the teeth. Teeth might add to the vert count but so does the rest of the high fidelity model. So overall it’s not the teeth. It’s the character.
It’s like being concerned the bathroom is on fire when the whole house is burning down.
