CPU, GPU, RAM Usage

[lafontainebdd]

Is it possible to allocate more CPU, GPU or RAM to cities skylines, I have a I7 6700K, 16 GB DDR4 Corsair Dominator Platinum RAM and a GTX 1080 and I get terrible performance. My CPU usage is 31% on average and I want the game to use the full potential of my hardware.

 

[MarkJohnson]

Build bigger cities. It needs to track more cims to use more CPU time. I was getting 100% CPU usage around 300k population.

Here's my 655k pop city with near maxed agents if you want to see your system max out.:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=610702468

 

[Anttonilla]

The CPU side seems to need some serious optimization. I'm afraid that this is what we have right now. My frame rates are not so good either.

 

[El Sicko]

Build bigger cities. It needs to track more cims to use more CPU time. I was getting 100% CPU usage around 300k population.

How do you manage to do that?
I max out on agents with 320k'ish on 9 tiles already.
Do you use (almost) exclusively Office zones?

 

[MarkJohnson]

How do you manage to do that?
I max out on agents with 320k'ish on 9 tiles already.
Do you use (almost) exclusively Office zones?

You have to organize your city to get agents off of the road. Watch the import/exports. Most people build too much industry and create too much traffic. You also need residential close to work. Commerce needs to be close to industry as well, or commerce will import goods and industry has a short range of like 0.5km radius. So they need to be very close together.

I posted my city if you want to look at it. I don't use mods, so it should load fine.

 

[jcitron]

I build my cities similar to Mark. I setup districts, or smaller towns spread around the map rather than jamming everything into one spot. This helps keep the load down it seems as each town has its own share of industry of some sort, commercial areas, and residential areas. The residents do travel between the different areas though as I found when I've followed CIMs around using the first person camera.

On my system, I see very little CPU usage and a bit of graphics usage which will increase and decrease depending upon where I am in my cities, as this most likely depends upon the quality of the assets - meaning overly built high-poly assets increase the graphics and CPU load more and increase the graphics usage as well. Graphics usage will of course increase if I pan around the camera since the assets need to load but then settle down to it's normal levels.

Curiously absent is a lot of disk access, however, RAM can get really, really peaked out at 30% which brings my total RAM usage up to around 85% for my system. I know I need more RAM which will help, but my budget is tight so the 32GB I have right now is all the system is going to get.

 

[res5ect]

My i5 is 90% full with 5k citizens

 

[KillerChicken]

Would a 32-core CPU be overkill for me? I do have 2x 16-cores. Windows 10, by the way, has memory compression, so I am using 4.5GB while the rest is compressed.

 

[MarkJohnson]

32-core would be overkill for anything but professional use.

memory compression means memory decompression and will use extra resources. not sure what, if any advantages it has. It sounds more like a ready boost trick to try and speed things up. but wasn't very useful except for extreme cases.

 

[Cryolemon]

Anything more than 8 cores is overkill except for professional use, really.

 

[lafontainebdd]

I have 16 GB DDR4 3000mhz, i7 6700K water cooled, GTX 1080 and the game is run off a Samsung Evo 850 but i get like 40-5- FPS on a blank map and 20 FPS when zoomed in on buildings, with those specs I would assume I'd get 60 FPS constantly

 

[MarkJohnson]

constant 45ish fps is the max I've seen. This is common with simulators as they have high CPU priority over the GPU and get low frame rates. This isn't a high FPS that utilizes the GPU.

 

[Anttonilla]

Nowadays I manage to get 65 fps max on my city of 135,000 people. Usually my zoomed-in average is around 20-30 fps. I also recently tested a one million citizens city and that didn't hurt my framerate at all. It's complicated I guess

Intel Core i7 6700k @ 4.4 GHz
GTX 970 4 GB
16 GB 2400 MHz RAM
Game running on a HDD


Edit: I remember that at the launch of Natural Disasters my bottleneck was quite clearly the CPU, since I could raise the resolution to the skies without losing frames. Now the situation is somehow different. My 970 seems to be the major bottleneck. Even 150% resolution scale hurts. I don't know if it's the mods or the updates but something changed

Edit 2: My framerates have also improved from about 45 fps max to 65 fps max

 

[lafontainebdd]

4.4 GHz, so you over clocked it? Maybe that would improve my game? Just a theory I guess.

 

[MarkJohnson]

Overclocking doesn't help the game run any better. But it could help with certain mods that do a lot of AI altering.

I overclocked my i7 4970k to 4.8GHz with no improvement. I bought a 6-core i7 and it helpped greatly, but the simulation was capped by unity by this time, so I didn't get any improvements, but cpu usage went down from 100% to 40%. Much better than I expected as 6 cores only offered a 50% improvement, but 25% slower clocks. 6-core had 3.3GHz only, while 4970 had 4.4 GHz. I think most of the improvements came from the large cache size. 8MB for 4-core and 15GB for 6-core. I think it helped with all of that multi-threading.

 

[lafontainebdd]

So really, they just need to do some serious optimizing. A high end computer should be able to run this game no problem.

 

[MarkJohnson]

So really, they just need to do some serious optimizing. A high end computer should be able to run this game no problem.

They really need to dump unity. Sadly I don't see it happening as Unity is multi-platform. i.e. supports windows, linux, and mac.

 

[lafontainebdd]

Maybe Unity itself could be more optimized.

 

[Sheepy !]

The game is poorly optimized, and with each update FPS just goes down. The dev's don't really seem to care, they seem to enjoy adding cosmetic DLC's and milking this game for as long as they can.

Recently the developers of the unity engine updated the latest version to have support for Vulkan API.

http://techreport.com/news/31116/unity-engine-adds-vulkan-support-for-a-big-performance-boost

C:S is notoriously CPU bound, Vulkan helps with efficiently using multi-core CPU's. It's up to the C:S devs if they decide to implement it or not. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they won't. We'll probably have to wait for CS:2 for all the things we really want.

For now, it's a 20-40 fps city painter regardless of your hardware. Mods and assets saved the game and made the possibilities endless, but playing at such low fps is a game breaker for me personally.

 

[MarkJohnson]

The game is poorly optimized, and with each update FPS just goes down. The dev's don't really seem to care, they seem to enjoy adding cosmetic DLC's and milking this game for as long as they can.

Recently the developers of the unity engine updated the latest version to have support for Vulkan API.

http://techreport.com/news/31116/unity-engine-adds-vulkan-support-for-a-big-performance-boost

Please don't misquote. Unity released a BETA version of its engine for Vulcan. No one uses BETA engine for releases. But CO did update Unity for Mantle support iirc. One of the AMD APIs that support dx12 multi-threading. But it will need a complete rewrite of CSL to take affect. You just don't enable it and it works.

C:S is notoriously CPU bound, Vulkan helps with efficiently using multi-core CPU's. It's up to the C:S devs if they decide to implement it or not. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they won't. We'll probably have to wait for CS:2 for all the things we really want.

For now, it's a 20-40 fps city painter regardless of your hardware. Mods and assets saved the game and made the possibilities endless, but playing at such low fps is a game breaker for me personally.

Umm, CSL has always been designed as a city painter as that is what the community has always asked for. People hate being pestered by the game to balance things out. People seem to want to build freely. CO has done a very good job of this. But with each update they keep adding what people want and it ends up complicating the game even more.

As for low frame rates this is largely due to using Unity and building a simulator. Simulators are CPU intensive and take priority over the GPU. Also, if you're using nvidia GTX 1000 series GPU they have issues with the game and they can be half FPS than normal. If you have one of these cards I highly recommend a complete uninstall of your driver and all bloatware and reinstall the latest drive with the driver only for best results.

Also, workshop items can lower FPS even further, by as much as 50%.

But we may need to wait for CSL2 (which might be released soon as CO have been on a 2-year interval between previous releases.) for Vulkan or even mantle support. Hopefully they dump Unity, but they may have no choice until they can develop their own game engine that can support not only Windows, but Mac and Linux as well, like thay have currently with Unity.