r/CitiesSkylines • u/OkEntrepreneur3340 • Oct 25 '23
Have I been pranked? Game Feedback
"Unplayable". "Shouldn't have been released". "Atrocious".
Based on the early reviews I read last week, I was disappointed that this game almost certainly wouldn't run on my mid-range 6 year old ROG laptop. People with $5k desktops were describing a game so slow they couldn't even play it, so I figured I'd be lucky to see the main menu.
To my shock, not only did the game run, but I don't think I even would have noticed a performance issue had no one mentioned it! Has everyone been messing with me? Sure, it's certainly not running at 10,000 fps and the camera jerks a little when you scroll or zoom, but come on. I don't even know my fps. I don't care. Why would I? It's a city builder. It's not impeding my enjoyment of the planning, the design, the tinkering, the problem solving.
I'm prepared for the downvotes, but this game is beautiful. I can only assume the developers are working frantically to improve the performance, and they probably did rush the release too much, but look past it for a minute and you'll see some incredible work.
45
u/m4nu Oct 25 '23
The vast majority of complaints are folks with top-end graphics cards trying to run the game at max settings with 4k resolution. I get it, if you pay for the machine, you want to use it. Nonetheless, only about 10% of Steam users play in 4k or with machines capable of rendering it. Those of us with more average machines have nothing to fear. The game is perfectly playable, at the settings I expected to be able to play at.
I can share screenshots if people want, but it looks better than CS1 did for me - taking in account the lack of custom assets that make all CS2 cities look kind of samey atm.
4k Pop City: 40-66 fps
100k City: 28-38 fps
System:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660
Intel(R) Core i5-9400F @ 2.9 GHz
16 GB Ram
Dual Monitors @ 1080p, 75Hz
Here are the settings I came to after about 20 minutes of tweaking to maximize performance at a good visual fidelity. It is important to keep terrain and texture quality at High to avoid the blurry mess a lot of folks are getting in their lowend guides.
Settings:
1920x1080
Vsync Off
DoF Off
Dynamic Resolution Off
Anti-aliasing High SMAA
Cloud Quality Medium
Fog Quality Enabled
Volumetrics Quality Medium
Ambient Occlusion Quality Medium
Global Illumination Quality Disabled
Reflections Quality Medium
DoF Quality Low
Motion Blur Disabled
Shadow Quality Medium
Terrain Quality High
Water Quality High
Level of Detail Medium
Animation Quality High
Texture Quality High