alt Hacker NewsHe is partly correct, but forgets about the polygon budget. The GPU is fast but not infinitely so. It has lots of texture memory, but not an infinite amount. Game developers have to balance graphical fidelity against the rendering time. They actually did a really bad job of this for Cities: Skylines 2 and it was a big reason why the game was so sluggish on release. Search for the story of the teeth for a particularly salient example.
Also that grand staircase should be something the player chooses to place, rather than something you get every time a path is sloped.
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When the player zooms in to street level on a building it's worth the performance hit to load in more details and do so in a better looking way. When it's zoomed out to view large portions of the city (or the whole thing) then sure, you have to trade off graphical fidelity for performance and usability as the user builds out the city and wants to watch it grow. The amount at a given zoom should be based on the graphics settings, and low should allow for low detail even when zoomed in.
As well as the teeth, I understand they had issues along the lines of using preview rendering tech in unity that then was not further developed and dropped from the engine? Causing them to need to write a fair amount of render stuff themselves? .. something similar to that at least I'm sure.
Much of what is suggested could decrease texture memory usage. If you add a masked dirt material on top of a surface, you can often decrease the resolution of the texture of the base material underneath thanks to the added detail.
This seems like the logical explanation, it still doesn't run that great even on GeForce Now
I was not familiar with the teeth thing. Link for the lazy:
https://www.ign.com/articles/cities-skylines-2-dev-addresses...