Even though Colossal Order has successfully delivered a hugely important new city-building experience, Cities: Skylines 2 performance leaves much to be desired. The game is, quite simply, exceedingly hardware-intensive, bringing even the most powerful modern gaming rigs to bear quickly and easily. We're not joking, either, an RTX 4090 will net you under 30 FPS at 1440p on High settings. A ridiculous prospect, perhaps, but it is what it is until Colossal Order optimizes things further on PC.

In the interim, you're probably not interested in waiting for weeks or even months until Cities: Skylines 2 is fully playable on regular PCs. We're not, either, and since we do want to play it, we knew that it was time for an all-new optimization guide, no matter what. That's precisely what we've prepared for you in the next couple of sections, then: a comprehensive, up-to-date guide on how to get the most Cities: Skylines 2 performance possible. Right here, right now.

READ MORE: Total Warhammer 3 PC Optimization Guide

How to Improve Cities: Skylines 2 Performance: A Comprehensive Guide

It takes just a passing glance at Cities: Skylines 2's huge community to see that the game is loaded with details and complex simulation capabilities. From cars toggling bright headlights for incoming traffic to the growth of trees, there's something special that's gone into the making of Skylines 2. However, we already have an idea of why the game might be running as poorly as it is.

For one, it appears that Cities: Skylines 2 may be loading in details and assets that should be LOD-culled. An obvious concern, if that's what's happening, but there's precious little you can do here. Instead, what we need to do is to focus on optimizing the settings that we do have access to, and that starts with our actual PCs.

Play Cities: Skylines 2 with optimized settings today!

Setting the Stage

One big boon for all our readers is that we already have two massive PC optimization guides ready to go. These are heavily researched and corroborated, and they will result in a small to moderate performance uplift, depending on your rig. Consider checking them out!

These will set you up with the best possible baseline for your Cities: Skylines 2 PC gaming experience, and they'll make sure that you've got no unnecessary overhead piling onto your rig's gaming workload. Give them a skim, implement what tweaks and fixes you can, and then we can move on to...

Update your GPU drivers, seriously

We cannot understate the importance of keeping your GPU drivers up-to-date. While doing so might've been almost entirely redundant just a few years back, this is no longer the case, and both Nvidia and AMD (and Intel, often!) deliver new release optimizations in their latest driver packages.

It's free, it's quick, and it keeps your graphics card in top-spec.

Optimized Settings for Cities: Skylines 2 Performance

With all of the above out of the way, it's time to talk shop. Your first order of business will be to go over Colossal Order's own setting optimization guide, as that's going to provide you with a reasonable baseline of expectations. The guide is both useful and not, in that it's quite phenomenal at explaining what each setting does, but also in that it doesn't give you a quick and dirty way of taking back some performance on the fly. That is what we intend to do right here:

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, these changes will massively improve your performance in Cities: Skylines 2, and we're not entirely sure that they all work correctly. There are some caveats to keep in mind here, however, as you do not want to set absolutely everything to the lowest setting available.

Notably, you're going to want to keep Global Illumination enabled, as you'll encounter lots of flickering with it off, and you should absolutely, positively avoid using the Tilt-Shift Mode, no matter how delightful it might be.

As for your rendering resolution, that one we're still not completely sure about. While some recommend switching it over to 1080p no matter what, this is not good advice in our book, so we'd try sticking to a native resolution if at all possible.

...and Stay Tuned

According to Colossal Order's recent AMA on Reddit, the studio is prioritizing performance improvements for Cities: Skylines 2 above all else. "The plan is to flush out all the performance issues that come our way as quickly as we can," said CO's chief technical officer. "Several of those have come to our attention only recently due to certain hardware setup that yielded unexpected results."

That's good news, then. It's still a poor technical showing on day one, but at least we know it's bound to get better in very short order. In the interim, 2Game's got you set up with a comprehensive list of tweaks and changes you can pull off right this instant. Be sure to make use of those, and then tune back in whenever you can, as we'll keep this article topped-up with the latest that Colossal Order puts out.

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Even though Colossal Order has successfully delivered a hugely important new city-building experience, Cities: Skylines 2 performance leaves much to be desired. The game is, quite simply, exceedingly hardware-intensive, bringing even the most powerful modern gaming rigs to bear quickly and easily. We’re not joking, either, an RTX 4090 will net you under 30 FPS at […]