I have found that with all my mods Cities Skylines is getting pretty close to outgrowing my 8GB of RAM. Not sure when or if to add an extra 8gb in, £60 for 8gb of DDR3 seems really steep, I guess prices haven't come down since I originally built my PC. However Cities Skylines seems to outpace my GTX970 as well as my I5 2500k, so I am fairly happy to call it a day and conclude that there really isn't much more I can do about that. The game is gonna lag no matter what as far as I can tell, all that is gonna change is that it will take slightly longer into a city before it does. So meh, its probably fine xD
Impossible for me to say really, There isn't much to compare it to and I don't feel like trying to go in depth profiling every little bit to figure out if their algorithms are fast. The only comparison I can really make is to Cities XL, which outside of its fairly major memory leaks performed very well for being single threaded. Which would lead me to believe that there is more that could be done for Cities Skylines in terms of performance. At the end of the day if you are trying to simulate over 200,000 individual people in real time corners are going to have to be cut somewhere. Perhaps its just that CitiesXL's simulation wasn't as complex as Cities Skylines, perhaps it was better optimised. Sim City 4 ran far better than any of the above, but the reality is that game took major shortcuts when it comes to traffic simulation, all citizens took the path of least distance, meaning if a side street was 1 tile shorter distance than a motorway your whole city would flock to it. Equally that game did not simulate traffic in real time, this is why cars always faded in and out of view, because they were nothing more than a representation of the average level of traffic a road faced. Sim City 4 basically said, if 300 people take this road to go to work each day then the traffic will be high, what the player saw was disconnected from the simulation. Cities Skylines simulates each person individually in real time, then checks every single road to see if it is congested, so what you see is exactly what is being simulated, its a much more satisfying way to run the simulation for a player, but way way harder to compute. So you can see it is very very difficult to say whether it is well optimised or not, since different people will have different opinions of what constitutes to being optimised in terms of simulation design. Equally without source access and profiling it is very difficult to say whether a simulation design was then implemented in an optimised way. I would be very tempted to cite that it is made in Unity as far as GPU efficiency is concerned, since games made in Unity tend to be badly optimised. But equally they seem to have done a pretty good job of it. They made their own shaders rather than using Unities, they highly customised everything about the engine. So maybe it is, maybe it isn't. They are rendering a lot of stuff to the screen. As for why it may run poorly on your system. The GTX750ti is a low end graphics card, your CPU is ok, but not great, apparently the game scales across cores well. But I don't know if the game was optimised with Intel or AMD CPU's in mind, but I would suggest that for any sensible developer in that time period it would be the former, preferably both if the budget allows, but if you have to pick one its bound to be the most popular one.
To think that I almost bought it for my mum's laptop (main PC before I had this lol) with an AMD A8... It probably would've been unplayable once the city starts to get bigger
Cities Skylines is a well optimised game, but like with BeamNG the physics are more advanced than competing games so it's looked upon as not optimised. Another Q: With the upcoming AMD Mobile APUs are they going to be upgradeable, like sockets, or BGA? **edit** No they won't, another BGA CPU.. I wish you could have upgradeable CPUs, but for one thing my new laptop better have socketed Ram, that is inexcusable
Depends on if they do an Intel and change the socket every generation. At which point there is basically no point in upgrading from an I5 to an I7 of the same generation. Especially looking at the U series processors where the I3, I5 and I7 are flat out the same thing with a 200-300mhz clock bump and if you are lucky an extra MB of cache depending on generation. However, I would like to point you in this direction. Since it would seem that on the high end they are going to shove desktop chips into mobile devices. I haven't seen a lot of outlets cover this yet.
Skylines is the only game in class with each AI entity individually simulated. Simcity didnt even simulate cars, it simulated a mass of them. It would flat out calculate 300 people must move from here to here, janky as shit. After about 10000 people, skylines does have a significant amount to process. --- Post updated --- Going up if anything as DDR4 comes down
It also doesn't help that my PC has 1.65v RAM modules too. While I probably could mix and match 1.5v and 1.65v memory modules that is a headache I would rather avoid. So I can't simply go for the cheapest 1600mhz RAM on the market... (although its only a few quid in difference) In hindsight it probably wasn't worth the £1-£2 saving when I bought the RAM all those years back. Live and learn I guess.
yeah, with that ROG tho i would expect battery life to be pretty appealing compared to say an Nvidia GTX1060 i7 7700HQ laptop because of the voltage of the Desktop AMD CPU and the GPU (how high is the idle consumption of the 580, must be higher than Intel HD). Also can an AMD APU laptop have discrete graphics? like can they change so you have the efficient bit of the APU and you have a full on GPU to keep new games running at decent FPS --- Post updated --- Yeah on the graphics front i think we could admit that it can be better optimised on lower end hardware, like it should run 30FPS Lowest settings on Intel HD at 720p and i don't think it can, if it will even open. I remember trying to load Cities on my HP laptop, yes a Core 2 Duo and an ancient ATI Radeon X1600 didn't work very well and the whole game had artifacts and just didnt work properly
You make a good point about the integrated graphics. I hadn't considered that Intel laptops use the integrated GPU and shut of the Nvidia one when they don't need it, whereas the AMD Ryzen desktop CPU's have no integrated graphics and therefore will have to keep the desktop GPU powered all the time. I guess if they have it as a product it can't be that bad, I guess AMD must be able to scale their GPU's in terms of power usage based upon utilisation effectively.
Damn, Linus just flat out launched a video full on criticising Intel. Its kinda rare to see tech reviewers go this hardcore on something like this.
Yeah I will agree that the X299 platform is an absolute mess, like 18C/36T to 4c/4t is bonkers, this might turn bad for intel, a bit like the Pentuim Emergency Edition (P4 EE) that really didn't perform compared to AMD --- Post updated --- was that on the iGPU or did it have a discrete GPU?
I already checked that theyre fine i was just worried that the screen under the glass could be broken.
