Heute gab es noch ein kleines AMA mit Colossal Order, u.a. mit ein paar Antworten zur Performance. Ich habe mal einige Dinge rausgeschnitten, es empfiehlt sich aber den selbst einmal alles durchzulesen, wegen Kontext...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkyl...were_colossal_order_the_developers_of_cities/
Q:
What will the plans for optimisation be? And how much can we expect in the upcoming month?
A:
The plan is to flush out all the performance issues that come our way as quickly as we can. Several of those have come to our attention only recently due to certain hardware setup that yielded unexpected results. The improvements we are working on are:
- Removing stutters, generally caused by some synchronization condition in the simulation and can greatly vary from one CPU to another, as well as how your city is built.
- Optimizing and balancing GPU performances by reducing the amount of vertices processed per frame and optimizing/balancing the effects that affects fillrate (mainly Depth of Field, Global Illumination and Volumetrics) which you can turn off or reduce in the settings for the time being to get a decent FPS.
- Push any CPU optimizations that are not already done that we come across in this process.
Q:
Do you think that significant performance improvements are possible? I.e. do you have the sense that a lot of performance is being left on the table right now?
A:
Absolutely! The performance issues that have widely raised concern in community feedback are not deep in the game foundation and in the release version, decreasing the quality of visual effects mentioned in my original post already will get you to fair performances without affecting simulation, at the cost of some eye candy.
With the upcoming patches, the situation will largely improve with default settings.
It is worth mentioning for a game like this, the performance target is to run at steady 30FPS minimum (not 60 or more).
Q:
Why release a modern game for 30fps, when the trend to moving towards 60?
A:
The target is 30fps because of the nature of the game, (arguably) there are no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher FPS (unlike a multiplayer shooter) as a growing city with inevitably become CPU bound. What matters more with this type of game is to avoid stutters, and have responsive UI.
For that reason, our simulation is also built around an expected update rate given 30fps. However, it does not hurt to get 60 fps as it can contribute to better visuals in relation to temporal effects so while our target is 30fps, we don't intend on limiting or stopping the optimization work just because we reach it on recommended hardware, we just don't believe there would be a long term benefit in setting the target to 60fps, especially because we face rendering challenges both from close up and far distances
Q:
Is there going to be, or are there plans for after release to have DLSS, or any of the other upscaling solutions to further decrease the load on GPUs?
A:
Yes there are plans. Right now, the game ships with AMD FSR1 which does not look that good when the scale ratio is 50% (you can enable it with Dynamic resolution scale setting) but is supported by Unity out of the box.
DLSS2 would require to use Temporal Anti-aliasing which is not possible at the moment due some objects being incompatible with that technique.
We are currently working towards making this possible (both with a more recent version of FSR and DLSS), which will not only help to boost performances and also provide a better quality anti-aliasing solution than the one we currently use (SMAA by default).
AMD Fluid motion/NVidia frame generation are definitely relevant to us as well but to be realistic, we have to work within the constraints of our technology so those will take much longer.
Q:
Bit of a weird one & not sure if it has been shown in some gameplay video, but is it possible to have grassy tram tracks?
A:
The vegetation is still WIP and there's a plan to add grass to the game. I'll make a note that you'd like to see grassy tram tracks!