No, mate, stop. The state of C:S2 is well beyond anything we should accept as "completely normal". It's a defective product that should not have been released. Stop normalising this crap.
The game runs fine and it's really fun. This "controversy" really drives home for me how detached from reality online discourse often is
Case in point: I get 6-10 fps on a 7900XT with the default settings, 17 if I use the lowest preset, all while seeing around 55-ish percent system utilization.
Something is amiss here and the game is definitely not running fine for everyone.
As someone seeing this weird performance issue I wish both sides would focus less on screaming at each other and make it easier to figure out the root cause so everyone can enjoy the game.
It should be better optimized, but calling it "defective" does nothing but make people dismiss your comment.
Chances are a nearly complete version of C:S2 was playable and they “broke it” at the last minute by not finishing the optimization process.
“Now you might say that these are just cherry-picked examples, and that modern hardware handles models like these just fine. And you would be broadly correct in that, but the problem is that all of these relatively small costs start to add up, especially in a city builder where one unoptimized model might get rendered a few hundred times in a single frame. Rasterizing tens of thousands of polygons per instance per frame and literally not affecting a single pixel is just wasteful, whether or not the hardware can handle it. The issues are luckily quite easy to fix, both by creating more LOD variants and by improving the culling system. It will take some time though, and it remains to be seen if CO and Paradox want to invest that time, especially if it involves going through most of the game’s assets and fixing them one by one.”
IE: The the game would have looked nearly complete even if none of these meshes where in use. Meanwhile the buildings themselves are optimized.
Gamedev has many shortcuts, and some things simply fall through the cracks. Some are caught and fixed, some are caught and not fixed, some just aren't caught at all. I imagine it's the 2nd case here; There's a unfortunate large amount of bgs these days caught by QA but not given time to fix before publisher mandates.
All this crying when they could have simply returned the product or not buy it at all. Colossal Order themselves warned about the performance before it was even released. There were plenty of reviews that said the same thing.
So to get up in arms about the performance means they are just being exceptionally stupid and entitled, and they should just grow up and stop crying over their toys.
Colossal Order can release whatever garbage they want to. And you can choose to buy it or not, or even buy it and return it (fight for better return policies if you want something positive).
