2023 was the year that GPUs stood still::A new GPU generation did very little to change the speed you get for your money.
We had hardware getting massive leaps for years. Problem is, devs got used to hardware having enough grunt to overcome lack of optimizations. Now we got shit coming out barely holding 60+ on 4080s and requiring usage of FSR or DLSS as a bandaid to make the game get back to playable framerates.
If you’ve got 30 series or 7000 series from AMD you don’t need to look for a more performant card, you need devs to put in time for polish and optimization before launch and not 6 months down the line IF the game is a commercial success.
Hell, Cyberpunk 2077 dropped 10-20fps with the last patch on my 4090, and the devs don’t care enough to fix it.
Cities Skylines 2 aims for only 30fps, and it can’t even hit that on my pretty good gaming PC.
Cities Skylines 2 is really bad because you’d expect given how poorly it runs on your 4090 that a meager 1060 wouldn’t run it at all, but on the contrary I’ll probably get the same performance as you. It’s like the game just… isn’t capable of taking advantage of your better card.
One thing that’s very apparent is that with more traffic the simulation slows down while the framerate isn’t (so all cars go in slow motion, even though I’m at 3x speed). This means that it’s severely CPU-limited.
I don’t know how multithreaded their simulation is, I have a 5950X with 32 hardware threads. Maybe an upgrade to the new generation of Ryzen CPUs that are going to come out around February could help.
A fix that worked for me on Cyberpunk dropping in performance after that patch - turn everything to low, restart the game, then change settings back to what they were.
