It is said that the highest-ranking graphics cards are tanking framerates in Cities: Skylines 2 for a very odd reason.
Cities: Skylines 2 recently came out with some alternative changes made to the game engine as well as how it is presented to the players. With more content and extra details, the game is currently capped at 30FPS to give the game engine smoother processing capabilities. So far only the enthusiasts who run their games on 60FPS complained; the rest of the true city builder fans are completely fine with the FPS cap due to the game’s natural flow and not needing a high framerate to be enjoyable.
Even though the game is set to be played on 30FPS, sometimes people could experience stutters and ditches in framerates for unknown reasons. After curiosity slowly crept into people over Reddit, they started deep-diving into the code and found some odd behaviors in the engine that perhaps might have led to its poor performance. Colossal Games, the developers, were aware of the issues and just recently released a patch, covering the issues and getting rid of them, but the findings of the community were pointing to something that was sinister.
Before talking about what was the problem, we need to know about LOD- the level of detail- first. Games are naturally equipped with LOD sliders, which act upon the player’s camera and adjust the level of detail of an item. If the camera is too close, the item in question loads the highest number of LODs to give the item a proper look, but if the item is at a far distance, it loads the lowest LOD to give the game a better time by loading fewer polygons. In Cities: Skylines 2, citizens who roamed the cities players created would have entire teeth being on the highest LOD at all times, without checking the origin of the camera.
Of course, this led people to think that the game was getting loaded with nothing but unnecessary polygons, causing huge loads to pile up on the processor and the graphics card. After the Reddit discourse of teeth of citizens roaming around caused a discourse on LODs, Colossal Order came forward and explained that there are some problems with LODs of other items, such as buildings and scenery, but pedestrians’ teeth are not one of them, as they do not load in even if the camera is relatively close to one.
So, in short, Cities: Skylines 2 does not lag because it loads every citizen with detailed teeth; it has to do with other entities that require more and more fine-tuning with the LODs. We have to wait and see what sort of measure Colossal Order will take to keep the game more reachable to people who built budget PCs rather than going for the ultimate build.
