Cities Skylines 2 reportedly runs with 7-12fps on an Intel Core i9 13900KS with AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX at 4K/High Settings

Might be good to have a watch of City Planner Play's Benchmarking video

To answer your main Q from this, apparently the biggest performance dropoff is going from no pop to 10k, scaling up to 100k isn't nearly the same dropoff.

Even with a beefy setup on high settings, CPP suggests turning off many of the post-processing effects and definitely disable VSync. Lastly 4K is out of the question for most cards, barely playable for top end enthusiast cards, Most will be limited to 1080p for a usable experience.

The good news from this video is that for anything above a 970 it is possible to get to late game, as long as you stick to 1080p low-med settings on any card with less than 8GB VRAM.

I suspect 4K is the biggest killer. Most YouTubers aren't playing at that resolution.

I was waiting for bikes, now I'll be waiting for this as well.

Same goes for me. I was really excited but this really is a big damper.

09 FPS 👌

Because they're playing with volumetrics disabled. That's the main choke point according to the devs and play testers.

Shhhh you gotta jump on the hate train! You can't just be happy a game is coming out here!

Probably not playing on High Settings?

It's not going to be worse than KSP2. KSP2 launched with game breaking bugs and all of the new features missing (and some of the old ones) as well as bad performance on ALL graphic settings no matter the specs. CS2 has features that differ it from the first game and the performance issues (allegedly) can be fixed by turning settings down (unlike KSP2). Both games launched (or will launch) without modding support which is really bad for both games.

Bad time for beloved indie sims getting sequels.

KSP2 still makes me sad. I still have the hope they can pull a no man's sky. The dream of KSP2 is all I ever wanted out of a space game.

There is actually a LOT more little things, that make the game very different. Besides who in the right mind would buy a 70 buck sequel with Just better grafics?

Just have a look at the dev diaries. For me personally its the overhaul of pretty much all simulation engines (traffic, weather, water, wind, people etc.) and that they solved (apparently) the single thread problem of their traffic simulation. For me CS1 was bottlenecked when the cities became to big and the traffic could only be simulated on one core. There is a limit to that. But my cpu was otherwise idle. I have hope that this is now solved. Plus there is apparently no agent limit anymore. So a town of 500000 could in theory simulate all people individually, CS1 couldn't.

They do invest a lot in cpu optimization. The problem here seems to be unoptimized GPU performance.

In addition, you will always struggle with CPU performance in complex simulation games with many interlocking systems. There's only so much you can do without limiting the gameplay.

Considering skylines is basically the only surviving city sim franchise, not much. But city sims have always had difficulty with performance. Sim city 4 was notorious for how badly it performed in hardware, even to this day

It's bad everywhere at the moment.