Theres a lot of talk about benchmarking in the press for CS2 but i’m interested if anyone in this community has purchased the game and what their impressions are for performance and playability.
Also if your playing on a older rig or a new one
Early game I’m getting 50-60 FPS @ 1440p on a 3070 and i7-12700K. Haven’t got to a high population point yet but I expect a drop as my city gets bigger.
Overall the playability is good so far. A few stutters here and there, and also some texture flickering. Not as bad as I was expecting from all the noise surrounding the game at the moment.
if there is no noise surrounding, what will be your verdict?
A solid foundation to build on I’d say. Needs better optimisation as my GPU runs hotter than I’d expect. As far as I can tell there are still a lot of quality-of-life things missing that were in the first game via mods. I’ve only played it for a couple of hours though so far though.
Game’s been playing fine performance wise on my 3080/5800, my main frustrations have been industry hub buildings not fully building unless you make sure they render when you place them by moving the cursor around randomly. Also industry specializations are ugly as sin.
Besides that, I severely underestimated the effect of wind on air pollution, we’ll see if restarting fixes that. Exporting electricity, at least geothermal, is overpowered. You can export more if you buy tiles out to the map edge, you just connect to the border and make new connections.
That specialized industry bug got me a few times before I caught on.
Other then that, I wish the game had a centrally located visualization mode that let me see overlays of info like traffic, crime, cost of living, etc from one place, instead of either not existing at all (traffic) or scattered under their building submenus.
But the game is fun and the road tools and traffic AI mostly fixes what annoyed me in CS1. Very happy with it.
Have a ryzrn 5600 and 3070 and performance is fine.
I don’t like how we have 2 games called CS2 in the same year. Since Cities has worse performance, I say we all agree to abbreviate it some other way, like 2 Cities 2 Skylines.
Let’s just call it CS:GO. The GO is for glitchy optimization
C:S2
I have no issues whatsoever on a 2080, 64gb ram and an old Ryzen 7 5800x. Runs great. As always, the online noise about new game is excessively negative for no good reason, definitely worth a buy if C:S is your thing.
I have a ryzen 2070 it probably won’t play on mine
Although I do have 32gb ram which might balance it out
Performance is not great, honestly. On my 3090 I had to sink settings to medium to get around 45 - 60 fps. However it does look nice, and even 30 fps is perfectly playable for a relaxed sim where my reaction speed doesn’t matter.
Playability is fantastic once I got the settings lowered. Love the changes to water and power, roundabouts are neat, roads are easier to manage, and the progression system has been surprisingly engaging. I really like the game and I’ll definitely keep playing while they work on optimizing it.
It’s recommend for everyone buying C:S2 to test with the 100k citizens save file (enable unlimited money to prevent achievement from triggering). In settings disable DoF, motion blur and Volumetric. Borderless window mode. Enable TAA, as that’s the only AA that I think usable.
On WQHD, RTX3080 10gb, 5900x, 32gb ram this will result in a mix out of playable and unplayable. Everything set to high. A small town will run >60fps, the 100k will be between 43fps and 10fps, depending on how many pedestrian walk around. Currently this is tanking my performance most.
I hope to see first performance fixes before I reach a 100k city. Also I still have the option to turn down level of details and global Illumination. Overall the game could use some more color, but is very playable on my small town.
The game has some other bugs, like difficulty placing roads/demolishing them. Quite a few shadow issues and other building/vehicle glitches. There’s also a lack of certain details that feel unfinished.
Some services don’t even work properly as they are bugged or hidden via bandaid strategies by the devs, for example early game city budget. Garbage trucks not moving out of building. Animation of npc visiting parks are missing. Bikes are yet to be announced (but somewhere on the roadmap).
Weird balancing decisions, like the milestone/money flow, while losing money. Lack of building variety and a lot of bad textures, like blurry roads, lacking grass, strange water surface style. There’s also bugs that textures don’t load properly. There’s some shadow/texture streaming issue going on.
Overall: I can’t recommend it, even though I currently play it and even have fun. The performance is too bad, the lacking details will needs a few months extra and some systems even longer before they’re fleshed out.
As fan, well of course I’ll swallow that and keep playing…
Edit: will report back after the latest patch today. I’ve heard +10fps for some.
Edit2: personally I believe the performance better now. Still lots of work to do but playable and stable.
I’ve been enjoying it… Lots of cool new features & fun gameplay… Have about 6 hours in it right now. Overall, i feel like the game has lots of potential even if some of it is unrealized at the moment.
PC Specs: laptop with i7-9750H, RTX 2060, 16gb ram… (below recommended hardware, but above minimum hardware)
Regarding performance: When I first got in, it was pretty rough… lots of blurry blobs of textures, invisible buildings, and lots of lag… Once I played with the graphic settings though, these issues effectively disappeared. The game looks very good and is very playable. It does still studder on occasion, but nothing that makes the game feel unplayable.
Regarding playability: The gameplay feels like a real upgrade compared to CS1. I know it sounds cliche, but the cities really do feel super alive. The progression feels natural and exciting. I actually got so inveloped in the gameplay that i completely lost track of time & ended up going to bed much later than i wanted lol.
While overall I really enjoy the game, there are a couple things to note that I find particularly annoying: 1 - The achievements… IMO, achievements are super dumb to begin with (wish there was a way to blanket turn them off), but CS2 really takes it to a whole new annoying level. Example: one achievement is to cure 6000 sims in the clinic/hospital. It literally gives you a popup notification for every… single… one of those 6000 sims cured. So incredibly annoying. 2 - I’ve encountered some minor bugs here and there… nothing game breaking, but they did get slightly annoying… 1 in particular was little invisible pockets of water on the land that made road placement difficult.
It runs on medium pretty well for me. Half the time you aren’t moving around much but staring in one spot anyway. I do kinda wish there was more music and stuff. For as long as people can play this, it gets awfully repetitive after a while. Why not the old CS music even? Just my two cents. Lots of good stuff make this game fun still.
City builders have always been the type of games where once you get sick of the soundtrack, you put on your own music. I’ve barely listened to the CS2 tracks because I’ve been blasting Simcity 3K, 4 and metal the whole time.
I’m on a Ryzen 7700x with 32gb or ram and a rx5700xt GPU. I average about 25fps on low to medium settings at 1440p. It’s not the best, but it’s playable.
Performance issues aside, it’s a much better city management game than CS1. The progression system is fantastic. There’s a lot to learn when growing your city. The wonderful part is you can really go at your own pace. I got a 15k pop city and barely touched some of the mid game tech yet. It’s not forcing me to upgrade like my city will come to a halt. It really is the best combination of management and city building we’ve had since SimCity4.
That being said there are some sore spots. Maps with bumpy terrain are a pain in the ass. It feels like I’ve done more terraforming in 10 hours of CS2 than 500 I clocked in CS1. That’s how ridiculous the terrain system can be. I have no clue what they were thinking making the terrain so janky in this game. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not game breaking. It’s more of an inconvenience. Like I have to spend meaningful time terraforming large chunks of the map to get good land. Even after that it still comes out janky. To my understanding it’s all about the map. Like maps added later in development were flatter and I picked one of the rough early maps. It’s still a jank system.The way buildings lay on terrain abd morphs the land is bad and needs to be looked at.
As good as the road tools are, they’re finicky. It’s probably because I don’t have the muscle memory for it yet, but I spend a lot of time micro moving roads into place to get the right connection. The node based system is great, but takes some getting used to.
Balance seems off to me. My industry demand is always on max. I’ll build out an area and it goes away just to pop right back to max once the new buildings are running. Then I look at the numbers and they don’t make sense. 10 workers for a factory is way to little. I end up having whole neighborhoods of nothing but factories. It’s annoying. When in reality there might be a few factories here and there, they each employ thousands of people and take up little space. Where as this game has you building full factory cities because each building employs no more than 20 people. It’s another thing that needs to be adjusted imo.
Those are the only things I have to complain about the game so far. During my first extended playthrough I thought it really felt like SimCity4. I was blasting the SC4 soundtrack when playing it, but the progression system felt familiar. It adds so much to the game. It gives you a sense of accomplishment when you see your work means something. And there’s a lot of levels a city can reach. There’s always gonna be something to work towards. Performance wise, it could be better. Hopefully it gets sorted out in the coming months.
I got 30fps on 5800x and 3060ti. I refunded the game.
