Want to increase your Cities Skylines 2 Performance? We have some handy tips for you!
Cities Skylines 2 has just been released on PC and will soon arrive on consoles. And while the reception of the new start in the iconic city builder has been warm, it’s been haunted by performance issues across the board. And while developer Colossal Order promises that fixes are already in the work, those might still be a while off.
So we’ve collected some tips and tricks on how to get your game to bridge the time until the update is ready.
Cities Skylines 2 Performance Guide
Reasons for the bad performance
Cities Skylines 2 is a very CPU-heavy game. Most gamers tend to upgrade their GPU and ignore the bottlenecks an outdated CPU might create. This is fine for many games which tend to lean more on the GPU but games with a large simulation aspect will suffer for it.
While the performance of the new Cities Skylines isn’t perfect by any means, the game tends to run better on newer hardware. The aforementioned bottlenecks will however only get worse the higher the resolution is set.
Possible Performance Boosts
Lower the Level of Detail
The Level of Detail seems to have a massive impact on the performance of Cities Skylines. It is recommended to play the game it very low LoD to squeeze out a better performance.
Disable Volumetric Qualities
Fog simulations as well as the simulation of all the smog in your factories will eventually tank your performance. Make sure to turn this option completely off, you’ll reap the benefits in the later parts of the game.
Play Windowed on Lower Resolution
If you have a big screen and can handle smaller windows, try running Cities Skylines 2 at 1920×1080 in windowed mode. While this isn’t the most immersive experience, you’ll at least be able to play the game on older hardware that way. You can also play at fullscreen if you can deal with a mushy-looking image.
Turn off the Depth of the Field
The DoF does a lot of work to make Cities Skylines 2 more presentable, especially at a distance where some assets like trees look a little worse for wear. Turning it off can give you some boosts to your performance.
Shadow Quality
This is a bit more tricky. Disableing it wholesale will make your game look significantly worse but you’ll also gain a good amount of frames from doing so.
In Closing
Your performance of Cities Skylines 2 will highly depend on the system you’re currently running. We haven’t experienced major issues or extremely low frames since we started playing. But that is to be expected from an AMD 7800X3D, RTX 4070 with 32 GB RAM.
Depending on your specs you want to tinker with all the options, the aforementioned ones being the heavy hitters that can impact your performance. Performance Preference set to FPS and Dynamic Resolution Scale set to Automatic can also help but the poor performance might be due to bugs and not poor optimization.
We’ll of course keep you updated once new info on the upcoming patch becomes available and we’ll have more coverage all around Cities Skylines 2 here soon on ESTNN