Gadgetory

okay so in this video we're gonna have a bit of fun I'm going to show you one of my favorite games that city skylines and how you can cripple your system literally bring it to its knees with one simple mod now that mod can be found in the Steam Workshop for city skylines I love the creator support there there are so many things you can add to this game it's one of the reasons why I keep playing it because I might get tired of a certain theme or a certain you know design I can get tired of a map I can download more many people are adding stuff to that workshop every day it's it's just one of my favorite games to play because there are so many opportunities and it's kinda like a sandbox game you know you're kind of the controller of your own destiny and I like that kind of stuff that's why I like the roller-coaster tycoon series Sim City you get the point but anyway the mod I'm going to show you in this video I've linked down below if you play City skylines I encourage you to try this out yourself we're gonna open up system usage as well by MSI Afterburner we have a video talking about how to get all that setup as well if you're interested in scanning your system and trying to find the bottleneck although I have a feeling in this case everything will be the bottleneck Thermal Grizzlies carbonate pads offer peace of mind ease of installation and industry standard performance in a market crowded with mediocre thermal compounds our own testing confirms that they conduct heat appropriately and provide a safe and consistent membrane between the dire IHS and cooler best of all you can grab them in several sizes and reuse them as many times as you'd like Carbonite pads are a peace of mind in my book and they're very consistent and that's why I use them for CPU testing check them out via the link below and the model were gonna be focusing on in this video is called ultimate level of detail again it's linked in the video description for those interested and this effectively increases or decreases depending on how you set it the loading distance for certain things in the game like trees buildings networks you can imagine when you have a really big city and you're trying to load all this stuff from a very far distance like if you zoom all the way out then you can really tax your system so the four toggles will be messing with our tree level of detail distance set to default right now for 25 prop level of detail distance 1000 building distance 1000 Network 1000 so networks are like roads bridges train tracks things of that sort buildings pretty self-explanatory props are smaller objects in the game and then trees again pretty self-explanatory trees are actually by default set fairly low by comparison because there are so many trees in the game and they very sharp edges they move in the wind and that can be very taxing on a system but you can see we can race this all the way up to ya 10,000 meters in the developer who says good luck and then 100,000 meters goodbye alright so you can see this is City skylines and I am actually building what's supposed to be Taipei although apart from the topography it really looks nothing like Taipei this is just an honor of Computex coming up again this year and at to the left you can see system usages GPU usage GPU memory right here sis's vram we have CPUs 1 through 16 these are all 16 threads in the 99 hundred km sporting I'm also using an RT X 20 80 for those wandering system Ram here you can see we have 16 gigs in total using about two-thirds of that at the moment and then our frame rate so to write x11 about 40 mid 40s and then you see when we zoom in and we get up close and personal here that framerate drops substantially down to about 25 or so and I'm ok with this like I don't I don't expect this to run at 100 200 FPS that'd be awesome but most of the time I'm just you know unlocked onto a certain position and I'm like building roads or doing something I'm not moving a lot while I'm building so the frame rate in this particular game is not as important to me as the level of detail hence the mod we have installed so what I'm going to do now that you've seen the frame rate with stock level of detail distances is bump that distance dramatically using the level of detail tool let's just do let's just do buildings let's try that first so I'm gonna go from 1000 meters screw it 10,000 meters let's see what happens okay and I'm gonna back out and now we're at 8f PS that was the one toggle folks I'm not even zoomed dag now when we zoom out even further right now it's having to account for many more buildings and our frame rate is about 5 fps so yeah our CPU usage has gone up a little bit you can see it's fluctuating but a lot of these threads are not being utilized much at all again look at thread 12 like 5% 15% back to 6% 15% back to 5% CEMA thread 14 thread 16 seems to be doing that thread for up here I saw was pretty low thread 6 I thought 30 FPS was bad but I actually kind of appreciate it now I don't think I'm ever gonna feel as excited to see 40 FPS as I will after I turn all this crap off so I know this is gonna be choppy but just to show you exactly what we're manipulating I have a bunch of dead people living here oh my gosh you can see if we get up close this buildings level of details pretty much maxed out for this game and we're going to zoom out now and normally that level of detail would diminish as distance between the camera and that building increases but since we've adjusted that scale distance now it is well - the pixelation that's you know I'm just the screens fault that building is in full detail as we zoom out to pretty much max distance and that's what's taxing this system rather the game I mean are you can see our video memory here it's about 7800 megabytes that's not technically maxed it's pretty close though and that could be one of the why this game is performing so poorly right now so the last thing I'm gonna do is bump up every level of detail draw distance - let's just do max screw it 100,000 meters can we get zero FPS I'm pretty sure this entire games gonna crash I can't even click on the setting there we go yep we're at 1 FPS - we're in the menu and we're getting 1 fps let's move this one up just for good measure to 100,000 it's like if I even can there we go this is extremely delayed alright prop level of detail distance growing down ever so slowly and now everything is maxed out goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye let's see if we can click out of the menu alright and I'm rotating right now you're seeing this at 1 fps and part of the game isn't even loading that's weird I've never seen that before you can see over here these buildings aren't even loaded that's possibly a vrm issue it's just not able to load enough into video memory so it's trying to do it on demand and when I rotate the you know angles of the buildings change and kind of freaks out the whole system looks like we're good now let's try to zoom in over there now it's completely gone let's try to zoom it this is where it's gonna get really bad Oh 2 FPS let's see if we can just watch some cars on the Wow I can't even if I click like a or D on the keyboard to move left to right it just skips so much is gonna give me a headache you see we have a few CPU threads here like CPU thread 3 is pretty high 74% 62% now some of these are pretty high but some of these are like zero like like thread 15 was like 0 a second ago all these threads are very low in terms of usage so definitely not a CPU bottleneck our system memory or excuse me our video memory is still pegged at around 70 hundred megabytes I don't expect it to go much higher than that I don't think it really can but our GPU usage is 28% 30% right now now looking too good but it's not Buse fault I would say this is probably a video memory issue which is there's just not enough of it and also just an optimization issue the game just doesn't know how to properly utilize the hardware at its disposal this can be broken down into several factors I would say the fact that the engine itself is just not prepared for the the stacks of hardware that we could potentially throw at this game the fact that our graphics card came out significantly later then this game did and I mean developers can they can do a little bit but they really don't want to change the entire framework of the game because then that ruins all the mods that all these creators have published in the workshop and it's annoying when cities publishes some you know software update that totally renders mods like these useless and then that could potentially ruin the save state of progress in the city so there are reasons why they keep it this way I mean I don't think they expect people to completely max out levels of detail distance but that is it we're we're at one FPS and I'm gonna call it this system just it's just it's not fit for this game city skylines has effectively crushed this pc yeah that was fun what do you think Pepsi that's pretty fun right I would pick her up she'll probably bite me should I do it I'll do it there we go okay I say head to the camera she's actually been pretty true right now like that okay she's not one of those kids that likes to be held unfortunately anyway that's City skylines for you like the game itself runs fine and it's never been a game that I've gotten to run over like 100 FPS especially in high or very high presets but there's a lot of stuff you can do to it and some of the things out there like this level of detail Oh will crush your system and look we're running a really nice system here right 9900 Kay it's no slouch from the best gaming CPUs in the market RTX 2080 again no slouch we were limited by our veer and we were also limited by the game itself just not being able to utilize the hardware at its disposal that's again comes down to the engine comes down the developers when they change a lot of stuff in a game or they just push out some totally new framework it renders a lot of these mods useless and the entire workshop for the most part and it falls apart people get really pissed off as they worked really hard on a city that has a lot of mods in it and now they can't even load into their game because their mods don't work anymore so it's understandable I still enjoy the game even at 30 or 40 fps and look a lot of that is because of the mods that I've put into the game which the initial developers really didn't you know intend to be used by a ton of people else they would have thrown those things into the game in the first place right so it's nice that we have that support and again if this is something you want to try I mean good luck you may think you have a system that can handle it let me know in the comments below how that goes you can find a link to that toggle that mod in the video description along with the game itself if you're interested in buying city skylines I play it again just in my pastime very fun game kind of like a sandbox game and you can just be creative that's really the point of it you guys like this video thumbs up you know what to do I can just feel through everything you guys have been awesome I will catch you in the next one this is science studio thanks for watching and thanks for learning with us