Cities Xxl Steam Reviews

Maxed core 0 ? 20% on the others ...... same as XL for the main game thread. What they have done is move a few background or system processes out to the OS.

 

Happy to see its multicore finally lol. Does anyone know if they'll start adding trains into the game? Also I'm surprised by how fast the steam workshop is filling up. It's been only a day or two since I checked and the inventory has nearly doubled.

 

Cities XXL is a slight improvement and is pretty fun but is not worth $20.

--Ocram

 

I dunno I disagree. There are some things I don't like about it, and I'm kinda ticked off they didn't improve it more, but for someone who would be playing the game all the time, it would be worth it. My biggest pet peeve however, is that they didn't fix the ridiculous traffic flow issue where only one lane moves through an intersection. That's super annoying, and they need to have the UI scale bigger. It's tiny at 4K lol. Otherwise decent game though I guess ^^

 

Ok nevermind now I'm kind of upset . . . They didn't fix the tree issue either. If there's a lot of trees in a city much of them disappear when you have to render all of them. Just figured out they didn't fix that. Great.

 

Not even FHI calls multicore go and tell them it is .

so its gone from 10 fps to 12 fps on that machine .... I bet no one tested this on min spec machine

I did nt pay 20 euros for the full game - so I am not gonna pay more for bug fix and wheres your review . did you spot the trading bug in your testing ?

 

FHI have said it's multicore, my CPU is defiantly working harder my fans go flat out. not sure if that is a great test lol.
Anyways no one is forcing you to buy the game! - the trading bug will more than likely get fixed. FHI said they will be fixing more issues as they arise, probably another release this week sometime!

also if you pre-own the game you should be entitled to a discount!

 

and FPS this isn't Battlefield or Call of Duty lol where you do need high FPS. really

 

Same here, and at near 4K resolution too.

Beats me how i can get 120fps on BF4 on Ultra, and 10 fps on Cities XXL with 10,000 Population..

 

prb cause they are totally different games Eastlev, like its not like your going into the game cities then going direct to ground view and be able to run around throwing grenades with a fps 100. well if you do let me know lol.

 

I agree about the graphics being the biggest performance hog in Cities (X)XL. When you have a fully built city there are a *lot* of 3D objects being rendered. Also since they are all placed dynamically and can be changed by the player at any time, the rendering engine can not do as much culling, hidden surface removal and other optimizations as in other games, where each level is optimized for the best performance and the minimum amount of draw calls, then compiled to the most efficient format.

 

I'm highly surprised with all the expert 3dsmax users and modders no one has pointed out that Cities is a crazy game...by crazy, I mean, I can't believe how WELL it processes so many polys and triangles... I play this game on a laptop and when my entire screen is filled with buildings,.. the one thought in my mind is, "hope my graphics card isn't frying right now" because there are literally thousands of things being rendered...especially if your trying to zoom in and out really quickly...your computer has to process all that shizzle over and over until it sizzles. At each zoom level there's a different # of things to process.

With this in mind...I've turned off shadows and everything else EXCEPT for maximum AA (Anti-aliasing, it's always at 16x) so that all my buildings are still super crisp. (There are some things that need to be edited, 4gb patched and your graphics card tweaked right) But I have hardly any lag and I also don't place a city hall, because all I want is to sandbox, not have population ruining my city building (I'm not certain population actually does anything, it shouldn't, considering it's just a #...unless the stats on each building drain resources?). I look at the game like a giant digital lego set...and it's super fun that way. When I want to take super supreme screenshots, just go to that place, bump up graphics to max and bam, turn them back down and go back to having fun. I mean how much fun can you have trying to micromanage trade tokens, or in the case of a game like simcity piping waterworks and electricity everywhere (lame). My advice, just build a city for fun instead of worrying about mechanics, so much more rewarding.

For those curious, I'm running on Win 7, i7, 2.20 GHz, Nvidia 560m, 6 Gig ram.

 

Guys, don't fool yourselves.. The game runs like shit. I have a GTX 970 4GB and still get 10-20 fps ingame. Not because of my card, but because of bad coding. The card is not used more than 10-20% of its gpu at all times and a mere 1.2 GB of graphics ram. If the engine was good than ALL cpu cores would be used to render equally, not just one core going full sail while the rest are walking, and the gpu would be used to help the engine do the rest.

 

The engine is a bit improved but could be atleast 3 times faster if it did use all cores equally on a pc. About the interface lag: I have a city of 2 million now and it does lag after a hour or so of playing, but not as much as it did on 2012. But new bugs which I have not had before have been coming at me, like getting 100% cpu usage on all cores when I lay roads or zones (yes even when starting a new game) and some bugs where my offices all placed the same building. Also things such as flashing trees sometimes, and roads flashing when layering them out. But this only happened now that my city is large.

 

I will not dispute performance problems, I have yet to buy CXXL to try it myself.
But there is NO way for all cores to be used equally. Multicore tech just does not work that way. Best thing you can get is have other cores come close to load that main core have.

Think of it this way:
You are trying to perform a task, lets say, fix a car. Your "cores" would be 4 guys. Will all of them always be busy? No, there is just no enough tasks that CAN be performed at the same time, as in they don't need something that other core is working on. In above mentioned example it would be like one guy is trying to test on board computer but some other guy is putting in new accumulator.

Off course in most cases, if for example, core 1 is at 100% and other do not break even 10%, then either there is no multicore support, or it is very poorly executed.

Also, I'm interested in this game, like Artmaster, to build great sandboxy cities. As long as I can relatively comfortably build my city, I don't care about other stuff.