I am not defending the game, I am attacking the method how they test and trying to paint their numbers for "content sake".

If you want to show how the game is NOT optimized, you need to show that:

• what the game is trying to do atm and how CPU is utilized, is it I/O throttled, cache blocked, memory allocation issues, etc.
• what the game is trying to render, how they render it and how GPU is utilized.

FPS is not a optimization meter because:

• there were dynamic scaling since forever on console
• there are several temporal algorithms that spread out calculation over several frames
• there are algorithms that takes up left over frame time to push fidelity further, so if they target 30fps/60fps, they will use the left over frame time to do more samples, do more post processing etc to make the frame look nicer.

At one specific point where it shows high stutter/frame time spike in one session but not the other and throws their hand shows exactly this, there is significant I/O penalty for when you first loading something fresh VS you load something again after change game settings and restart the game, that's how system level cache works. You can then point to that and say "they could have preloading some asset before the game started and goes into your city." Instead of just "something is not done right". (link to exact time stamp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4DX6mUY78s&t=545s)

There are so many other youtuber milking the high spec games released recently and gives no insight or whatever since they don't know jackshit about how the game work. They are like the cheap digital foundry copycat and I don't want to see GN goes that route.