issues with GPU barely utilizing but CPU overload.

[Xcile92]

im getting ugly spike from 10-25fps while GPU utilization is below 50% even though i see it is mostly at 0%. but when i play the game in high density because my city is massive. it eats my CPU mostly. its barely touches my 32GB RAM. im using STRIX RX590, FX8350, Corsair 32GB 1.6Ghz RAM and the game is installed on a SSD SATA3. i have had this issue for about 4 years now. it runs worse than GTAV. and gta is DX11 too and i can get 60fps on high FHD and GTA is far more graphical and process hungrier. i've had to lock the affinity on Skylines to 4 cores due to it being a broken mess. i wont buy skylines 2 if the first game doesnt get fixed concidering DLC is what £298. and they're planned to release skylines 2 and not fix skylines. after all the patches they have released since 2018 when my GPU was released you'd think to add RX590 in compatibillity? we're in 2023 and you sevice your game but no GPU support for a GPU thats still active today by AMD. so if i was to finish building my new R7 5700X with RX5500xt will that not work too? and this is ment to be better than SimCity 2013... even though that game is dead. it works on my pc...

 

[backface]

Cities Skylines needs CPU and RAM rather than GPU, it barely use them.

I have a RX570 8 GB and I really had a bad performance on a Intel Pentium Gold 6405, despite having also 32 GB and the game on SSD. I had good performance on games such as GTAV, Asseto Corsa or F1 2020, playing in top graphic quality. I updated only the CPU (and motherboard) to a i5 12400 and the game changed from barely 15 fps or less to more than 60 fps (with peaks of 70 to 90 fps) with the very same city 100k, using plenty of mods, but not assets (only 500), because long time ago I lean that assets kills performance. No matter you install a Nvidia 4090, the game performance would be the same because the CPU is the bottleneck of performance in this game.

I am not an expert on software, but I guess that move Cities 1 to a new Unity version or other engine it's really hard (and expensive) so won't happen at all, just being realistic. I guess that they would learn about it, and Cities 2 should have a better performance and take advantage of multicores and graphic cards

 

[MrDaaark]

im getting ugly spike from 10-25fps while GPU utilization is below 50% even though i see it is mostly at 0%. but when i play the game in high density because my city is massive.

That's normal.

Your CPU is your computer. It handles all your computing.

Your GPU is a add on card that takes lists of polygons and renders them out with the provided shaders. And a few limited other uses, like crunching long lists of numbers.

Your GPU can render out your city no problem, and Skylines doesn't push it too far, because it's a relatively simple task as far as 3D scenes go.

Your GPU however, has nothing to do with continually looping through a large citywide dataset and making decisions for x number of people and cars. Cities Skylines is a simulator, and it will gladly keep eating up more and more CPU as that dataset gets bigger. Doesn't matter how much CPU you throw at it, Skylines will always want all of it.

Other games won't use as much CPU because they aren't simulators and are programmed to have small tight loops and get as many FPS as possible. Also, the speeds and capabilities of CPUs have outpaced the processing needs of your average game. Having dozens of characters walking around and doing simple gameplay tasks isn't that taxing on the CPU unless the software is very poorly written. These games also tend to render much more complicated scenes that make more use of the GPU.

Basically, in general,

GAME: Lighter on CPU / Very heavy on GPU

SIMULATION SOFTWARE: Very heavy on CPU / Only as much GPU as needed.