Paradox Interactive and Iceflake Studios have published City Corner #4, a deep-dive dev diary focused on Cities: Skylines II’s performance, including what “performance” means for a dynamic city builder, what the team is currently investigating, and what improvements are being prioritized next.
Key highlights of the dev diary include:
- Rendering Performance (GPU): The team is prioritizing more and improved Level of Detail (LOD) models to reduce the number of triangles rendered (and improve shadow rendering efficiency). They’re also investigating ways to improve water simulation performance and terrain rendering, where a significant amount of generated geometry ends up culled or discarded due to being off-screen or too small to display.
- Simulation Performance (CPU): On the CPU side, performance issues tend to surface once cities grow, often tied back to pathfinding frequency and cost. The team is exploring potential gameplay/system adjustments (e.g., smarter citizen behaviors, better reflecting city scale with pedestrian counts) while continuing to track and address issues that can cause excessive pathfinding.
- A New Benchmark Tool: Iceflake also previewed an early iteration of a benchmark tool intended to help players compare performance between patches. This also gives the team better data on where optimizations are needed. This tool is planned to be included in the next patch, currently targeted for the end of the month.
Iceflake Studios continues to investigate and optimize performance further (including collaboration with Unity to help pinpoint and resolve specific issues), and we’ll keep you in the loop on future patches.
