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Cities: Skylines >  Workshop > Krzychu1245's Workshop > FPS Booster > Discussions
FPS Booster
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meda22 7 Mar, 2021 @ 5:07am
General question regarding CS performance and fps in game
Hi, I hope you don't mind a question which is not directly connected to this mode but I think I could get some educated insight to a problem I am facing when it comes to fps in Cities Skylines.

I play on system with i5-8400, nvidia rtx 3060 and 32gb ram.
I have problem with huge fps drop - even below 20 fps - when I make close zoom in in some area which is fully built - now, I do understand I can't have this game running on 60fps all the time, but drop below 20 fps seems to be too much to me. I make several tests - it doesn't matter if city is big or small (tested on city with 20k pop and 90k pop) neither if I am playing with mods or without (tested with --noWorkshop). For a moment I thought that CPU could be a bottleneck but when I made tests, CPU usage was from 30% (paused simulation) to 70% (running simulation) in the big city. GPU usage was always in range 30-40%.

So I am wondering - is it possible that I have something wrong with game configuration? Or is there some recommended "Nvidia Control Panel" setting for Cities? Would anybody know what I could try to fix it or what else should I check?

Thanks!
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Showing 1-8 of 8 comments
Krzychu1245  [developer] 7 Mar, 2021 @ 10:59am 
Could you post few screenshots where you experience low fps and high fps for contrast?
I feel like it would be easier to explain and point you where the sources of performance issues could be and also it might help to find out if it's configuration problem or not.
#1
meda22 7 Mar, 2021 @ 2:18pm 
Thanks for answer! I meanwhile tried reinstall and some assets and mods reduction... it got slightly better actually, but there is still 20 fps drop from zoom out to zoom in. Here are some examples (city with 100k pop):

Without mods:
zoom out[drive.google.com]
zoom in[drive.google.com]

With mods:
zoom out[drive.google.com]
zoom in[drive.google.com]

I am using Afterburner for measuring. As it is visible on screenshots, it doesn't matter if mods are used or not - in both cases zoom out has over 40 fps and zoom in around 20 fps. Actually - in modded version - there is even no difference if use dynamic resolution or not (e.g. 200% - 300%, all has exactly same results, though there is visible higher usage of resources).

Please, let me know if this kind of screenshots is helpful or if I should provide some more info... Thanks!



PS. or maybe I just have unrealistic expectations about game performance :D
#2
Krzychu1245  [developer] 7 Mar, 2021 @ 3:35pm 
Hmm, do you use FPS Booster? Looking at results I doubt.
That screenshot with lower fps is clearly CPU bottleneck, because the game needs to process a way more objects than you actually see. It's tricky object culling problem, because game engine cannot create static occlusion regions -> everything is placed dynamically.
#3
meda22 7 Mar, 2021 @ 4:08pm 
Actually, I use FPS Booster but I don't see that big difference - which is also little bit strange to me because when I had GTX 1060, I saw quite big improvement with FPS Booster. Should I post logs etc?

Regarding CPU bottleneck - so it seems I was quite optimistic when I thought that if usage is around 70% then cpu is keeping up quite ok :)
#4
Krzychu1245  [developer] 7 Mar, 2021 @ 4:23pm 
Yes, please post logs (load any savegame, run for few seconds and collect logs using the button in mod options) because it looks really weird. Maybe some kind of incompatibility?

CPU has only 6 cores so... let me count -> 1 for rendering, 1 for simulation, only 3 for pathfinding(could be 4 but only on 8+ core/thread CPU).
In other words 5 of 6 available, so 83% max, but realistically about 75% (there are other things which still need to run, interurrupting hipothetically 100% usage of 5 threads) and also game engine spawns about 60-80 internal software threads for various purposes(most of them are inactive but still may wake up when needed).
Your 100k city look also pretty live on those screenshots, so I think TM:PE active pathfinding indicator don't show zero PFs but way more, probably value is increasing over time -> not enough cores to keep up with pathfind requests.
#5
meda22 8 Mar, 2021 @ 7:37am 
Thanks for that CPU load explanation - I haven't thought about it in this way!

So here are the logs: logs[drive.google.com]

btw. yes I can see TMPE pathfinding going up and down from 0 to 40 (maybe even more) and then back to 0.

also - I really appreciate that you are taking time to help me with this.
#6
CosmicFurFace 8 Mar, 2021 @ 3:28pm 
FWIW, my experience with my laptop, AMD Ryzen 7 4800H w/GeForce RTX 2060, is that I have never seen CPU over 60%, but if you're using Windows Task Manager change view to Logical Processors rather than Overall Utilization (right-click on graph). What I see is one or two of my 16 threads maxed at 100%, most others at under 30%. Many games seem to have this single-threading limitation. It confused the heck out of me for awhile!
#7
M.S.Referee 19 Mar, 2021 @ 4:41pm 
From your picture and you got "Speed Slider [v2]" mod. This may the 'problem' head. "Speed Slider [v2]" slow down whole Simulation cycle of game.

You can unsubscrible "Speed Slider [v2]", and disabled 'Vertical Sync' from 'Settings' of game, then go to "FPS Booster" mod option and select limited FPS to 15. And see what happend.

(By the way, post your whole mod list will be good.)
#8
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