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Zkuq on 07 November 2023
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JEMC said:

A tech analysis of Cities: Skylines 2 proves it's rendering WAY too many polygons, making Cyberpunk 2077 look like Minecraft in comparison
https://www.pcgamer.com/a-tech-analysis-of-cities-skylines-2-proves-its-rendering-way-too-many-polygons-making-cyberpunk-2077-look-like-minecraft-in-comparison/
A technical analysis of the graphics rendering in Cities: Skylines 2 has identified the reason why the performance is just so poor. Put simply, the game is trying to draw the cityscapes using a shocking number of polygons, with few systems in place to reduce the amount when it's not needed. It's not something that should be happening in a modern game but the recent breakdown also suggests changes within Unity are partly to blame, too.
>> It's worth a read to realize how messed up is the game. The breakdown comes from a Reddit post, also in the article, in case you prefer to read it from its source.

I skimmed through the analysis article, and it seems like a pretty good read. I'm currently thinking the game needs a good bit of optimization but necessarily for all of the listed slow parts, as the game, as well as it seems to utilize the CPU, will probably become CPU-bound at some point anyway, at which point it doesn't make (much) sense to optimize rendering further. But there's definitely a lot of sensible room for rendering optimization still. I think they released the first moment they thought the game run passably on a range of hardware they considered acceptable, and considering the hardware that can actually run the game passably, I think that's an... understandable decision, although not one I would have picked due to the outrage that was - or at least should have been - easy to foresee.

I'm personally having more fun with the game that I would without it since it still runs just fine at 50k population, so I'm all for this decision, considering they're 100% going to optimize the game to a degree largely considered acceptable, unless the outrage manages to kill the game first (which doesn't seem to be the case at the moment, since the game is #16 on Steam top sellers globally, right below Mass Effect Legendary Edition at -84%/9.59€). Should definitely have released in Early Access or something though to make it clearer what the state of the game is.