Patch Notes for 1.0.12f1 hotfix - Steam & Microsoft Store

[RaftermanNZ]

If your computer suddenly completly restart that is a hardware issue. The most common issue is too high temps, in order to protect the components it will turn off the computer by default. Download GPU-z and save it to log to confirm, other issues can be a bad power supply, which also can turn itself off to protect the system. CS2 is a demanding game so having this issue isolated to it is not unsurprising.

Please stop calling it a hardware issue only, it's more complicated than that, respectfully, it can't be a coincidence that CS2 is the only application to ever experience these types of BSODs, CTDs, and restarts on this system. The temps are normal, the power supply is pumping enough power. CS2 is the ONLY, and I repeat ONLY application to trigger these types of crashes and system behavior, there isn't a single other application on this machine that is experiencing these types of crashes. Even applications that put way more stress on the computer's ram, GPU, CPU, and hard drive than CS2, they don't cause these issues. Applications that max out every component's power draw, capacity are not causing crashes like CS2 is causing. Benchmarks and stress tests don't even come close to causing this instability.

There are plenty other players reporting having these issues too, some report CTDs without system crashes, others are reporting the full restarts. The restart might be hardware related, it might be that some with the CTDs don't have the same system configurations, but are still having the same software issues.

I've benchmarked this PC build on MUCH more demanding applications and had zero issues. I've benchmarked, tested, done all of the checks, and there are no issues. This is what's frustrating, no one's taking that fact seriously, that CS2 is the only application that leads to this kind of behavior. Cinebench, GPU-z, memory tests all show everything is fine on this system.

I found that turning off hyper threading solved the issue, as others have reported this being a solution. It could as you say be a hardware issue considering that fix, but with CS2 being the only application among hundreds of others that are just as demanding, causing these types of crashes is NOT a coincidence. Something is wrong software side and it's frustrating to have that fact shrugged off in troubleshooting suggestions.

It's just like the issues with StarCitizen, for some reason there's weird things happening with the newer gen CPUs and these games. E-cores being another culprit to funky behavior in these games.

The issue is CPU related. But it's not just hardware, there is an issue with the game, CS2 is the only application on this system to lead to BSODs, restarts, CTDs.

Here was my post noting my temporary solution to these crashes. Since doing this, the game has not crashed to desktop once, it has not restarted the computer at all, it was inspired by a comment I found on Steam noting to disable hyperthreading and e-cores:

*Disable Hyperthreading in the bios.*

I also disabled my e-cores in the bios, but I did that before I disabled hyperthreading and still had crashes, so hyper threading seems to be the culprit of the crashes AND the bluescreens/system restarts.

This solution comes from a comment I read in a buried deep discussion on Steam. Someone disabled hyperthreading and game worked.

After doing this, game runs fine without having to impose FPS limits or disabling XMP profiles, or lowing graphics settings.

I operate on an Intel i9 13900k, 64gb ram, RTX4090 on Windows 10. While the CPU runs hot between 80-95c (typical for this CPU), GPU is steady at 70c max. I use an ASUS Z790 TUF mobo.

Things I tried before this:

Reinstalling C++

Reinstalling GPU drivers from scratch in SAFE MODE.

Reinstalling the game.

Disabling XMP profile (Reenabled it before applying the fix, game works fine with XMP profile)

Limiting FPS to 30 & 60 fps (game still crashed).

Testing in Cinebench (no issues, minus a single application crash, but that seemed isolated after more tests).

Repaired corrupted system files.

Ran memory checks.

-None of these solutions worked, and just lead to more and more frustrations, until disabling hyperthreading.

-Some of the suggestions here about hardware being the issue are both right and wrong. Right in the fact that it's a CPU related and that hardware is partially to blame, however, it is ONLY CS2 that causes these types of crashes on the system, so there's something with the game itself that doesn't like the hardware configuration related to the CPU and memory. I suspected it may be memory related because I'd sometimes get blue screens with generic error codes, event viewer would show generic error codes, and some of the freezes would lead to black screens with brightly colored text only from the game with glitched audio, before restarting. Other times the computer would just go blank and automatically restart.

Finally, the game would typically crash the PC, or CTD, or bluescreen after about 5-10 minutes of play. While 30fps limits helped stability for a while, on bigger cities we were back to square one. Since applying the fix (hence the confirmation of it being in fact a solution), I let the simulation run for an hour while I showered and ate dinner. Something I couldn't have done before disabling hyperthreading as I would come back to a reboot. Hopefully this fix holds up, and that I'm not premature, but so far this is the most stability I've gotten at zero FPS limits, and on big cities.

DEVS, please take note of all of the information here, crash logs included on a post in the linked bug thread. It's clear the game is crashing the PC, or affecting the hardware in strange ways as it's ONLY happening with CS2 and it's not hard to find other users reporting the same issues.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...0fps-otherwise-it-crashes-to-desktop.1605773/

 

[Sarvik]

Unfortunately the game started to crash after the update. Before the update there were no crashes, 86 hours played. Going back to CS1 and other games until the problems are solved, currently the game is unplayable.

 

[Artax Nighteven]

Unfortunately the game started to crash after the update. Before the update there were no crashes, 86 hours played. Going back to CS1 and other games until the problems are solved, currently the game is unplayable.

It did 3 or 4 crash to me after the update, but after that i got 0 crash, i think there are too many things happening and resetting all togheter after the patch, put an auto save every minute and let 1 or 2 months pass without touching anything, try to lower the graphics only for those 2 months, it will not work at 100% but you should try imho

 

[co_avanya]

Could you also do something about color blindness? Sometimes I miss the colors of the bars.

It would be really great to have a separate/dedicated thread for improvements that would be helpful or any issues you have run into.

Can anyone confirm if hte virtual texturing fix is referring to the bug where the game would suddenly make things black and/or super low quality at random, fixed by changing the mips setting in advanced graphics options?

That's indeed the case, though we are aware of some additional situations that trigger this, so unfortunately, it isn't completely gone. But at least some players should experience it less often now.

Thanks for all of this!

Can we, at some point, get a more detailed explanation of the economic simulation?

Also, it would be super helpful to have a better view into the impact certain buildings have on measures like "wellbeing," "attractiveness," "industrial efficiency," and so forth.

We'll look into this. In the meantime, the dev diary on the economy is the most detailed information we have available right now.

 

[MNMRX]

I was hoping I would see some improvement after the texture tweaks but no my city still looks like s***
and word when it will be fixed?View attachment 1040584

I wonder why they do touch textures with patches which before were working well since first release.

 

[pixartist]

That's indeed the case, though we are aware of some additional situations that trigger this, so unfortunately, it isn't completely gone. But at least some players should experience it less often now.

So the "Texture reloading" bug is a symptom of running out of video memory I assume? Thus buffers being purged and re-initialized or something? That's really strange that my 3080RTX would run out of memory that often. It kinda happens every time I zoom in closely.

 

[TehBotol87]

Always Crash After Update every 30 minutes, i Play On Steam And Xbox Gamepass

My PC Spec :
i5 13500
RTX 3060TI
DDR5 32GB
NVME SSD

 

[Baalzamon85]

Please stop calling it a hardware issue only, it's more complicated than that, respectfully, it can't be a coincidence that CS2 is the only application to ever experience these types of BSODs, CTDs, and restarts on this system. The temps are normal, the power supply is pumping enough power. CS2 is the ONLY, and I repeat ONLY application to trigger these types of crashes and system behavior, there isn't a single other application on this machine that is experiencing these types of crashes. Even applications that put way more stress on the computer's ram, GPU, CPU, and hard drive than CS2, they don't cause these issues. Applications that max out every component's power draw, capacity are not causing crashes like CS2 is causing. Benchmarks and stress tests don't even come close to causing this instability.

There are plenty other players reporting having these issues too, some report CTDs without system crashes, others are reporting the full restarts. The restart might be hardware related, it might be that some with the CTDs don't have the same system configurations, but are still having the same software issues.

I've benchmarked this PC build on MUCH more demanding applications and had zero issues. I've benchmarked, tested, done all of the checks, and there are no issues. This is what's frustrating, no one's taking that fact seriously, that CS2 is the only application that leads to this kind of behavior. Cinebench, GPU-z, memory tests all show everything is fine on this system.

I found that turning off hyper threading solved the issue, as others have reported this being a solution. It could as you say be a hardware issue considering that fix, but with CS2 being the only application among hundreds of others that are just as demanding, causing these types of crashes is NOT a coincidence. Something is wrong software side and it's frustrating to have that fact shrugged off in troubleshooting suggestions.

It's just like the issues with StarCitizen, for some reason there's weird things happening with the newer gen CPUs and these games. E-cores being another culprit to funky behavior in these games.

The issue is CPU related. But it's not just hardware, there is an issue with the game, CS2 is the only application on this system to lead to BSODs, restarts, CTDs.

Here was my post noting my temporary solution to these crashes. Since doing this, the game has not crashed to desktop once, it has not restarted the computer at all, it was inspired by a comment I found on Steam noting to disable hyperthreading and e-cores:

I called it hardware issue because total system reboot crashes are 99% based in hardware issues. With temps and PSU the first two you have to check before going further. Regular system crashes to desktop can be more software related.

E-cores and hyperthreading should always be turned off in games, it's not specific to CS2, they are not for gaming, people are just uninformed of what their function is and people buy these CPUs with a ton of cores thinking they can improve gaming performance when in fact they are just not designed for that purpose. They infact lower overall performance in games and causes instability as you found out. It's also of course a hardware releated issue, so I was right then... Just because it's CS2 that makes you realize you have something wrong with your hardware setup doesn't make it a CS2 issue, nor does it mean by calling it hardware issue it's something anyone was trying to handwave away, I was trying to help you. Hardware is a lot easier to test for yourself than a software issue within CS2.

 

[Ving3fyr]

Great Work ! You guys are amazing. But yeea please fix the Export. bug pleeeeease

 

[Sarvik]

It did 3 or 4 crash to me after the update, but after that i got 0 crash, i think there are too many things happening and resetting all togheter after the patch, put an auto save every minute and let 1 or 2 months pass without touching anything, try to lower the graphics only for those 2 months, it will not work at 100% but you should try imho

Thanks for your advice, it worked. 1 1/2 hours now without crashes.

 

[co_avanya]

We’re seeing a bunch of questions about why the patches are released on Steam first, followed by a release on Microsoft Store a little later. The processes for releasing patches vary slightly from platform to platform and the content may vary depending on the fixes. This leads to the patches being released at different times.

As an example, the first hotfix (1.0.11f1) also included a fix for the pre-order and San Fransico Set DLCs not showing up correctly on the Microsoft Store, which meant it required more work than the Steam patch.

Please do not blame Microsoft for the delay. They are a respected and valued partner, and we’re working very hard to make sure everyone receives the updates as soon as possible.

 

[tamsi99]

Here are my specs:
AMD 7950X
RTX4090
64GB Ram
2TB NVMe

I play 1080p max settings and I average 40fps in the city. Close to 50-60fps in suburbs. FPS seems to be unrelated to the actual geometry load though. I'll sometimes get 60fps in the middle of downtown and 30fps looking at a gas station at the edge of the map.

My CPU load at max simulation is 81% on all cores and GPU load is hovering between 47% and 63%. I'm currently CPU bottlenecked. My GPU load maxes out to 90% and my FPS jumps to 70+ if I pause the game.

The simulation slowed down a lot though. I'm currently getting one in-game minute each 3-4 seconds.

Thank you so much for sharing all this insight, very interesting. It looks like despite running into the CPU bottleneck, it does not completely kill the visualization, i.e. still a certain performance / FPS is maintained. This is great. As far as I know and have experienced, in CS1 your framerates go down the drain if you run into the CPU / single-core bottleneck. With CS2, when reaching the bottleneck, it seems to "just" slow down the simulation because there's only so much that can be calculated per second, but it does not go to one-digit FPS (at least if your GPU is not a bottleneck as well).

Is it still playable at that simulation speed? I guess cars, etc. drive slower now, or how does it handle that?
Given my current CPU i7-12700K, I guess I roughly reach the same state with around half of that population (i.e. around 250-300k pop).

 

[tamsi99]

E-cores and hyperthreading should always be turned off in games, it's not specific to CS2, they are not for gaming, people are just uninformed of what their function is and people buy these CPUs with a ton of cores thinking they can improve gaming performance when in fact they are just not designed for that purpose. They infact lower overall performance in games and causes instability as you found out.

While this statement applies to most of all the games, I anticipate CS2 to potentially be one of the first game where this statement might not be true any more. CS2 was designed from scratch to make use of all CPU cores, not just 4, 6 or 8, as many other games seem to do.

When I look at my i7-12700K with 8P and 4E, I see all 12 cores, i.e. all 20 threads, being used by CS2 quite evenly. While I won't take the effort to prove it, I'm pretty sure the simulation capacity would be significantly less if I disabled the E cores or hyperthreading. Also, an i9-13900K also only has 8P cores, but 16E cores, it seems to have a much higher simulation capacity than my i7-12700K. This is not just because of higher power budget and architecture but because CS2 can make use of all the 16E cores meaningfully as well.

 

[humorpalanta]

Thank you @co_avanya . We understand you have a lot on your table right now. All we ask is just a bit more visibility on what is going on. Please maintain your attendance on the forum in a similar fashion.

 

[Rumpelstilzkin]

The "ads" button does not impact the public service announcements ("there's a traffic accident, uh, somewhere in the city") nor the DJ clips on the public radio. It does correctly disable the company advertisements which is everything that interrupts the other two radio stations, but usually when people are asking about disabling "ads" on public radio, they mean they want uninterrupted music. There's not currently a way to get uninterrupted classical music on the public radio station, you'll get several minutes of talk every 2-3 songs regardless of the "ads" setting, and it gets repetitive pretty quickly.

Since most people are conflating ads with public service announcements anyway, it would make sense to have the "ads" setting also toggle the service announcements and DJ clips, especially since the DJ is essentially advertising the station you're already listening to anyway (in a quite obnoxious manner).

The workaround posted was to pick a different station, but those play a different style of music.

i turned the radio off for good before reching lvl2. it was worse than real radio chatter! it felt like satire but also as if they meant it. very wierd and super annoying. that person in charge needs to be asked a view questions!

 

[benzoll]

Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB RAM, RTX 4070 TI, SSD M2 1TB.
Without VSYNC, without motion blur, without DoF, without resolution scale.
High quality settings by default. Resolution 1080p.

Tampere, 46k cims.
After patch 1.0.12: the use of VRM has dropped from 7GB to +-5.5GB. The use of RAM has dropped from 14GB to +-12,5GB.
GPU overload in menu after loading virtual textiras has dropped another 20% (buzzing of fans).

The first load has been unstable, with fps peaks and tremors. I have played 5 minutes, save the game, and restarted game: all ok.

With the naked eye "lack of clients" have been corrected in stores, and also high "eligible" for the different schools.

 

[tweety80]

Ohh... I tested it and on my system, I see right away an improvement in performance.

Thanks for putting out a patch!!!

 

[Artax Nighteven]

E-cores and hyperthreading should always be turned off in games, it's not specific to CS2, they are not for gaming, people are just uninformed of what their function is and people buy these CPUs with a ton of cores thinking they can improve gaming performance when in fact they are just not designed for that purpose. They infact lower overall performance in games and causes instability as you found out. It's also of course a hardware releated issue, so I was right then... Just because it's CS2 that makes you realize you have something wrong with your hardware setup doesn't make it a CS2 issue, nor does it mean by calling it hardware issue it's something anyone was trying to handwave away, I was trying to help you. Hardware is a lot easier to test for yourself than a software issue within CS2.

You usually would be tooootally right.
But not on this game.
They tested it with a 32c old and slow xeon, it was at 70% with 200k people utilizing ALL 64 THREADS.

This is somenthing new

 

[Baalzamon85]

You usually would be tooootally right.
But not on this game.
They tested it with a 32c old and slow xeon, it was at 70% with 200k people utilizing ALL 64 THREADS.

This is somenthing new

Who tested it? The goal is to not spread out workload on more cores than you need ,it's to get a performance uplift. Ghz and cache has been the king sofar since games are ususally hardlocked by a main thread and 8+ cores being overkill. I would like to see actual scalable proof of performance increase versus a 7800x3d for example.

 

[tamsi99]

Who tested it? The goal is to not spread out workload on more cores than you need ,it's to get a performance uplift. Ghz and cache has been the king sofar since games are ususally hardlocked by a main thread and 8+ cores being overkill. I would like to see actual scalable proof of performance increase versus a 7800x3d for example.

I think you are confusing two different aspects. Most games are GPU bottlenecked, and the CPU can support this up to a certain extent. All benchmarks of games I've seen measure the FPS you can get with different CPUs and yes, for that there is a limit of CPU cores that make sense. For many games this is between 6-8 CPU cores.

For CS2 it is different. The question here is not about "how much FPS", the question is "how many agents can you simulate" to have a still running simulation. If your city gets larger, the simulation load is what determines how big the city can become. This is very different from the average game where the simulation load usually stays around the same for the whole game. For CS2, those simulation calculations can be spread out to all available computing power, i.e. to all available CPU cores. So the size of a manageable city with your PC scales with the amount of cores you have. This also applies to E-cores.

I guess there is also a limit of cores where the overhead eats up the benefit of additional cores, but from what I've seen this is certainly not around 8 cores but probably not lower than 32 cores with CS2.