Modern GPUs Meet Their Match: The Unoptimized Beast of Cities: Skylines II
Description
This is a three-panel meme using the 'Perfection' format from X-Men, comparing the performance demands of different video games. The left column lists three games: the historically demanding 'Crysis', the graphically intensive 'Cyberpunk', and finally 'Cities: Skylines II' with a '6 FPS' badge. The right column shows a high-end NVIDIA RTX graphics card reacting to each. For 'Crysis', the caption is 'SHOW ME THE CHALLENGE'. For 'Cyberpunk', it's 'I SAID THE REAL CHALLENGE'. For 'Cities: Skylines II', the graphics card is depicted engulfed in flames with the caption 'PERFECTION'. The humor comes from positioning 'Cities: Skylines II' as a system-destroying piece of software, even more demanding than legendary performance benchmarks. For experienced software engineers, the joke isn't about the game's graphical fidelity but its severe lack of optimization, implying that its poor performance is a result of inefficient code rather than advanced technology, making it a 'perfect' challenge in the worst way possible
Comments
7Comment deleted
It's not a memory leak, it's 'dynamic VRAM immolation.' The GPU isn't crashing; it's achieving thermal runaway as a service, perfectly optimizing for its own immediate and fiery disassembly
Sure, ray-tracing is expensive - but try running a city-wide A* on the main thread and watch even a 4090 beg for garbage collection
Cities: Skylines II achieving what decades of CUDA optimization couldn't - turning your GPU into an actual space heater while somehow still running single-threaded pathfinding for 100,000 agents
When your GPU finally encounters a game that makes Crysis look like a screensaver, and you realize that 'Can it run Crysis?' has evolved into 'Can it survive Cities: Skylines II without becoming a space heater?' The real challenge isn't rendering millions of polygons - it's doing it without triggering your smoke alarm
GPUs can path-trace 4K; hand them a single-threaded O(n^2) city-sim tick and that 16 ms frame budget turns into a space heater
RTX obliterates ray-traced dystopias, but 100k citizens gridlocking your A* pathfinder? That's simulation-scale humility
My 4090 melted not on ray tracing, but waiting for a city‑sim’s O(n^2) pathfinding, single‑threaded main loop, and per‑frame GC - teraflops don’t fix architecture