Cities Skylines 2 players expose high-poly teeth as the reason for performance issues

One of Cities Skylines 2’s performance issues has been exposed by players as due to high-poly teeth being constantly rendered.

Cities Skylines’ long-awaited second installment has finally arrived after nearly eight years since the first’s release. However, the game has come out to a wave of players pointing out the game’s poor performance at launch. 

But some sleuthing players decided to get to the bottom of what’s causing these issues, and a player found that one of the reasons the Cities Skylines 2 is performing so poorly is because of the NPC’s high-poly teeth. 

The game DOES render individual teeth with no LOD as far as I can tell.
byu/Hexcoder0 inCitiesSkylines

Pointed out by user u/Hexcoder0 on the Cities Skylines subreddit, they found that the game renders individual teeth on the models of the NPC. 

Hexcoder0 went into detail as to why it’s a problem, but we will help simplify it. The problem is that the game always renders it. In-game, we aren’t always shown NPCs in detail, usually seeing the game from a birdseye view. 

However, they found that even if they zoomed out from a close-up view of an NPC model to the birdseye view they normally play in, which makes rendering the teeth with detail redundant, it still rendered the high-poly teeth, which takes up a lot of performance. 

The protocol in most games is to leave details that are too far from a player’s camera to notice as low poly as to not save performance, but, Cities Skylines 2 doesn’t do that. And with the amount of NPCs that can appear in a given city, it can get quite demanding. 

As surmised by a commenter, “The game seems to render very high-quality character models all the time, even when you are very far away from them (including high-quality teeth, which is of course hidden), therefore making any visual clarity irrelevant, which is wasting vast amounts of performance for basically no benefit.”

Luckily for players, Paradox Interactive has rolled out Cities Skylines 2 first patch, which addresses many of these problems relating to the LODs.