Anyone running Cities Skylines on Ryzen?

eddiew · 27 Mar 2017 at 15:55

Question as per title, wondering how it performs

It's one of the few games that really maxes out (and heats up!) this ol' 2500k on all cores, but there's not much on t'interweb about whether it can take advantage of AMD's latest. Would love to believe that 8/16 would be twice as fast, but... you know how the story usually goes

FredFlint · 27 Mar 2017 at 20:16

I have the game but it’s not installed and I have not played it much. I could give it a test if you could tell me the best way?

eddiew · 27 Mar 2017 at 20:49

FredFlint said:
I have the game but it’s not installed and I have not played it much. I could give it a test if you could tell me the best way?

Basically I'd just love to know if it's loading up more than 4 cores in normal play. I imagine it was designed for i7 quads at the top end, but I'm holding out hope that it counts the CPU cores rather than just assumes 4

Might be easiest to pick a popular scenario from Steam, if you don't have any saves kicking around?

http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/...o&actualsort=toprated&browsesort=toprated&p=1

(I think I'm running some CPU munching mods, cos I'm hitting 80% at 3x speed with only 4000 citizens...)

FredFlint · 28 Mar 2017 at 03:59

Hi, I installed it but have forgot how to do anything so have no idea how to load it up with something that could stress the CPU? I had some saves but they must not be synced as they are gone. After reading some steam threads it looks like it will use more threads so a CPU with more cores will be better, a 1700 or 1600 Ryzen should give a nice boost over a quad core.

eddiew · 28 Mar 2017 at 10:09

FredFlint said:
Hi, I installed it but have forgot how to do anything so have no idea how to load it up with something that could stress the CPU? I had some saves but they must not be synced as they are gone. After reading some steam threads it looks like it will use more threads so a CPU with more cores will be better, a 1700 or 1600 Ryzen should give a nice boost over a quad core.

Appreciate the effort

Easiest way to get the game to load the cpu is more cims! One of the transport scenarios from Steam (linked above) should provide enough to give a good idea of whether it's loading all cores. Alternatively you could try a high pop city download such as http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=407199923 which my 2500k really won't enjoy...

There's an older article where the C:S devs conclude that the game is optimised for 4 cores, but will benefit a bit from more: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comme...der_the_team_behind_cities/cowups4/?context=3 ...but I'm not sure if progress has been made during that time.

Tbh, I think I'm inclined to wait on some 1600x benchmarks. I don't think it will be a step down from a 2500k @ 4.2-4.3 in the single thread area, but I don't really have anything that's going to benefit from a heavyweight 8c/16t either

FredFlint · 28 Mar 2017 at 16:31

Hi, Loaded the 630K+ city with no traffic jams:

eddiew · 28 Mar 2017 at 19:27

FredFlint said:
Hi, Loaded the 630K+ city with no traffic jams:

I'm impressed by the overall lack of utilisation for such a large city

But... it's definitely not loading all threads equally methinks. Definitely something to investigate further before committing to. Thanks for the help, very much appreciated!

FredFlint · 28 Mar 2017 at 19:51

eddiew said:
I'm impressed by the overall lack of utilisation for such a large city

But... it's definitely not loading all threads equally methinks. Definitely something to investigate further before committing to. Thanks for the help, very much appreciated!

The first core will always get more load, it’s at about 50% load. The rest of the threads will be up and down and I only ran it for a few minutes. The main thing the task manager shows is that Cities Skylines does use more than 4 cores, if you play this game a lot then 6+ cores will help.

eddiew · 28 Mar 2017 at 22:12

FredFlint said:
The first core will always get more load, it’s at about 50% load. The rest of the threads will be up and down and I only ran it for a few minutes. The main thing the task manager shows is that Cities Skylines does use more than 4 cores, if you play this game a lot then 6+ cores will help.

Mmm, I dunno... if one core is more heavily loaded, it suggests someone has bunched up a lot of the code into a single thread, which isn't ideal. I'd have hoped they made use of anonymous threads and allowed the OS to assign them around as it saw fit... But if it is using more than 3 other cores at least some of the time, then yeah, obviously more than 4 total will help, so this is good to know

I'm most impressed by how little total load you see... unfortunately it's a massive pain to prevent C:S mods from loading, so I can't easily try that scenario on a clean install without unsubbing from everything :/ But I strongly suspect it would nail all 4 of my cores to the ceiling - it certainly used to at 100k pop, and I don't imagine they've improved the efficiency that much over the last 18 months or so! A 1600X is looking quite viable, under the circumstances