Cities: Skylines 2 might be biting off more than it can chew when it comes to rendering teeth

UPDATE (30 October, 9 :28AM BST): Cities Skylines 2 developer Colossal Order has since issued a statement to IGN in which it says that the game's: "Citizen lifepath feature does not tie to citizen geometry and does not affect the performance figures of the characters." It added: "We know the characters require further work, as they are currently missing their LODs which affect some parts of performance. We are working on bringing these to the game along general LODs improvements across all game assets."

As you might have heard, Cities: Skylines 2 has had some teething issues from a performance perspective and, ironically, it looks like one of the many factors that could be contributing to these problems is how the game renders its citizens’ pearly whites.

Naturally, while they wait for Paradox to deliver some updates designed to help the game to run a bit more smoothly, the first of which arrived yesterday, some players have been busy trying to work out which aspects of it could do with a bit of extra optimisation. As it turns out, one of the things that might be partly responsible for the game’s hardware-intensive state may be the gleaming gnashers of its NPCs.

According to the results of some in-game testing conducted by Reddit user Hexcoder0, it seems that CS2 might have been rendering high quality individual teeth in the heads of its citizens regardless of how far away its camera is from them. “I've looked a bit into what the game draws using NSight and it turns out that teeth are not only drawn, but in this particular camera view from like a block away they are still drawn at full resolution,” they wrote.

Typically, when details like this reach a point at which they aren’t actually visible to the player, their models will be automatically swapped out for less detailed versions that don’t impact the game’s overall performance as heavily. Using an external profiler to measure how their rig’s CPU and GPU are handling running the game it looks as though the Redditor has uncovered evidence that Cities Skylines 2 isn’t telling systems to conduct this swap at the right times or at all.

“This means the asset in question is still rendering at full detail, which uses way more memory and compute time for little to no real-world graphical gain,” one fellow Redditor explained in the post’s comments section.

While the incredibly detailed teeth have rapidly become the main thing being talked about as a potential performance drain, Hexcoder0 points out that they definitely don’t look to be the sole culprit. “In fact, in my initial scans through (the game), it seems like cars in particular use (autogenerated) LODs, but props and citizens do not,” they wrote, “Using my (recommended) settings on a 1080, the majority of the gpu time seems to be just drawing meshes.”

If the performance issues that’ve been plaguing Cities: Skylines 2 have left you unsure whether it’s worth giving a go, make sure to check out our review.