He 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.
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.
Culling details smaller than a pixel isn't even sacrificing quality. It's literally just what rendering is. That's why you don't render a sheet of 10^23 individual atoms.
db48x · · focus · HN ↗
Also that grand staircase should be something the player chooses to place, rather than something you get every time a path is sloped.
zamadatix · · focus · HN ↗
mitxela · · focus · HN ↗