Cities: Skylines 2 Performance Woes Due to High-Poly NPC Teeth
Description
This image is a screenshot of a tweet from user 'tom' (@tombomp) discussing a performance issue in the game 'Cities: Skylines 2'. The tweet reads: 'apparently one of cities skylines 2's many performance issues is that it uses high poly models for each of the thousands of people walking around your city. including their individual teeth'. Below the tweet is an embedded screenshot of a Reddit post by u/hexcoder0, titled 'The game DOES render individual teeth with no LOD as far as I can tell.' This embedded image is a two-panel view. On the left is a screenshot from the game showing a city street at night with distant pedestrian figures. On the right are two green wireframe 3D models against a checkered background: one of a human head and another showing a highly detailed, high-polygon model of a set of teeth. The meme's humor stems from the absurdity of allocating significant rendering resources to an imperceptible detail. For experienced developers, this is a classic example of catastrophic misjudgment in performance optimization. The failure to use Level of Detail (LOD) scaling for NPCs is a fundamental mistake in game development, making the situation both technically ridiculous and a relatable example of how projects can fail on basic principles
Comments
27Comment deleted
The Cities: Skylines 2 dev team must have a দাঁত for detail. They took 'every citizen counts' a bit too literally, right down to the polygon count of their molars
Somebody skipped the decimation pass, so now your GPU gets a full orthodontic consult every frame
Somewhere a senior graphics engineer is screaming 'WHO APPROVED DENTAL COVERAGE FOR 10,000 NPCS?' while frantically writing a LOD system that should have shipped at launch
Ah yes, the classic 'we modeled individual teeth for NPCs you'll never see up close' optimization strategy - because nothing says 'shipped on schedule' like your GPU rendering dental work for thousands of pedestrians simultaneously. It's the game development equivalent of implementing a distributed microservices architecture for a todo list app, except here the technical debt compounds at 60fps (or more realistically, 15fps). This is what happens when your art pipeline has more fidelity than your LOD system has stages - a masterclass in how to turn a city simulator into a very expensive orthodontic visualization tool
Thousands of high-poly mouths sans LOD: because in city sims, perfect bicuspids trump playable framerates
Perf review: pathfinding 6 ms, simulation 9 ms, DentitionRenderer 28 ms - when YAGNI becomes You Allocated Geometry Nobody Inspects
Rendering per-NPC bicuspids at street-view distance is the 3D equivalent of shipping with TRACE logs on in prod and then wondering where your p99 went
One question. Why? Comment deleted
would you want to build a city for people with no teeth? Comment deleted
because you need a better gpu to play and so is just an intermedium Comment deleted
lets stop buying the game for 1 week so they go bankrupt and stop making bad games Comment deleted
Bruh💀 Comment deleted
Finally, a compuer for Cities Skylines 2 Comment deleted
The drivers are not available yet we must wait so they get ported /s Comment deleted
Then we can finally play with negative latency Comment deleted
it used to be joke about crysis for a long time ago Comment deleted
performance will always be an afterthought, because once you get to it, computers have generally become faster and the required work has automagically shrunk Comment deleted
Except that it hasn't. Comment deleted
yandere sim toothbrush moment goes AAA, genuinely wow Comment deleted
Clowncomputing Comment deleted
that person just identifies as an apache helicopter Comment deleted
I imagine a sapient AI installed in a helicopter drone. Comment deleted
https://colossalorder.fi/?p=2049 Comment deleted
at least its on par with Starfield 🥴 Comment deleted
damn why "child" has such big boobs?! Comment deleted
Because of negative latency™ coming of age. 👌 Comment deleted
I thought it was real wtf Comment deleted