Identify what's slowing down your progress in Cities: Skylines.
Identify what's slowing down your progress in Cities: Skylines.
I just started playing Cities: Skylines, and it’s well known to be quite demanding on the CPU. When my city grew in size, the frames would drop especially in crowded zones—nothing unexpected. Curious, I checked if it was the CPU or GPU that was limiting performance. I opened MSI Afterburner and recorded a session. It was a brief run where I moved the camera across different map areas, shifting between high and low density zones, heading out to sea, and back to my wind turbines. To my surprise, the GPU never exceeded 70% usage inside any city or village, but reached 110% (GPU Boost) when focusing on the wind turbines. I didn’t see the CPU spike in afterburner, so I assumed it was maxed out and causing a bottleneck. But when I reviewed the logged data (hidden content), I found something interesting: the lowest FPS occurred at the point where I was viewing the most crowded area. Until I stopped the game, the frames kept dropping because I was in the densest part of the map. Inside cities, the GPU stayed between 30-60% utilization, which clearly wasn’t the issue. I expected my CPU to hit full capacity at 100%, but the chart shows none of my eight cores are at that level—actually, none are close. This makes me wonder why performance isn’t better even with an overclocked CPU. It feels odd having a CPU that’s not reaching its potential while other components aren’t saturated. Neither the DRAM nor VRAM seems to be at full capacity either. Could my old HDD be slowing things down? Please help me improve the setup for smoother gameplay. Spoiler: CPU usage is low, but performance isn’t where it should be.
It seems the issue might be with the CPU, as Cityscapes performs well on single-threaded tasks. Your HDD usage is probably high, which could lead to slower loading times.
It prefers 6 to 8 threads with an i7 processor. The CPU is crucial—he requires an i7 for stability and to avoid crashes.
You mentioned your message carefully. Did you mean to ask why your cores don’t reach full utilization even though Skylines favors single-core performance? In reality, the tasks seem distributed across all cores, but still not at 100%. I see cores 1 and 2 getting a bit more work, yet they’re nowhere near maximum usage. Performance drops are normal, but reaching 100% isn’t possible—shouldn’t it peak then drop to a lower level before rising again?
based on what I've noticed, windows struggles to clearly display separate thread usage in an intuitive way. I've seen applications that are fully single-threaded still show up as 12% efficient with 8 threads—this is something I'd investigate further by checking my installations and testing it out.
I previously played the same game on my old Core 2 Quad Q8300, and it worked just fine. I don’t understand why an i7 is required—my CPU was quite old but still performed okay.