Hanno fatto un AMA sul subreddit:
I understand it's a long shot for you to reply outside of the AMA hours, but -
Why release a modern game for 30fps, when the trend to moving towards 60?
I'm still here!
The target is 30fps because of the nature of the game, (arguably) there are no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher FPS (unlike a multiplayer shooter) as a growing city with inevitably become CPU bound. What matters more with this type of game is to avoid stutters, and have responsive UI.
For that reason, our simulation is also built around an expected update rate given 30fps. However, it does not hurt to get 60 fps as it can contribute to better visuals in relation to temporal effects so while our target is 30fps, we don't intend on limiting or stopping the optimization work just because we reach it on recommended hardware, we just don't believe there would be a long term benefit in setting the target to 60fps, especially because we face rendering challenges both from close up and far distances
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Do you think that significant performance improvements are possible? I.e. do you have the sense that a lot of performance is being left on the table right now?
Absolutely! The performance issues that have widely raised concern in community feedback are not deep in the game foundation and in the release version, decreasing the quality of visual effects mentioned in my original post already will get you to fair performances without affecting simulation, at the cost of some eye candy.
With the upcoming patches, the situation will largely improve with default settings.
It is worth mentioning for a game like this, the performance target is to run at steady 30FPS minimum (not 60 or more).
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What will the plans for optimisation be? And how much can we expect in the upcoming month? Also will there be more building styles in the future?
The plan is to flush out all the performance issues that come our way as quickly as we can. Several of those have come to our attention only recently due to certain hardware setup that yielded unexpected results. The improvements we are working on are:
- Removing stutters, generally caused by some synchronization condition in the simulation and can greatly vary from one CPU to another, as well as how your city is built.
- Optimizing and balancing GPU performances by reducing the amount of vertices processed per frame and optimizing/balancing the effects that affects fillrate (mainly Depth of Field, Global Illumination and Volumetrics) which you can turn off or reduce in the settings for the time being to get a decent FPS.
- Push any CPU optimizations that are not already done that we come across in this process.
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