Complexity in Cities: Skylines 2: How Hard Will The Game Be to Run?

So, here's the jig: Cities: Skylines 2 will not be easy to run. This is a high-density, high-complexity cityscape building experience and even the original Skylines - when modded - could bring modern PCs down to their knees. Now that the sequel's official hardware requirements have been announced, we thought it may be a good idea to look into them more carefully to discuss whether complexity in Cities: Skylines 2 warrants such a huge bump-up in spec necessities.

READ MORE: Cities: Skylines 2's Confirmed New Features

Do you need a good PC for Cities: Skylines 2?

There's no getting around it, building the city of your dreams with the best graphics, requires a high degree of hardware. It's no surprise, therefore, that the Cities Skylines 2 recommended specs have ballooned pretty heavily in comparison to the original game, with the recommended specs requiring an Intel Core i5-12600K CPU, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU or equivalent, and 16GB of RAM.

Before delving into more details, however, here are the full Cities: Skylines 2 Hardware Requirements for your consideration:

Minimum:

Recommended PC Hardware Specifications:

Obviously, these are not impossibly high. The RTX 2080Ti isn't even close to being the most powerful modern GPU, after all, and the same can be said about the recommended CPU specs, too. Yet, it's not hard to see why some fans may be concerned, either.

After all, the original Skylines recommends a meager GTX 580 and an i7 2700K, but it still can use far, far superior hardware to the absolute max. Through poor CPU scaling and questionable threading, of course, but still - something to consider. Might Skylines 2's new spec necessities be warranted, though?

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Why Is Complexity in Cities: Skylines 2 Such a Big Deal?

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Cities: Skylines 2 - and cityscape simulators in general - cannot easily be compared to regular video games. The thing that sets them apart is that they need, by definition, to have multiple layers of simulation running concurrently and reliably. You've got your waterways, your power, your sim-peoples, your traffic, your foliage... the lists goes on and on. A regular game or even a regular sim simply doesn't simulate all the things that a city-sim does.

This calls for rapid-fire CPU cycles by default, as one might imagine. Now, having a high frame rate isn't the be-all-end-all for Cities: Skylines, as it's a relatively slow-paced game. Still, we generally don't want to go below 40ish FPS on PC, and it should ideally be as stable as possible. You can read up on frame times and their importance in our previous article.

Back on track, though: Skylines 2 is going to take things a big step further than its predecessor ever did. Any of the screenshots featured in this article should explain as much, as we're getting a much more intriguing and granular simulation than ever before. With this, come increased CPU requirements.

Why Is 2080Ti The Recommended GPU, Though?

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Now that the CPU requirements are explained, there's the obviously tall GPU order. An RTX 2080Ti for a non-RT video game? Why on earth would that be the case? The answer, though, is pretty straightforward in this case: Skylines 2 looks way better than its predecessor. In some instances, we've seen downright photorealistic graphics - the kind of stuff that can feasibly be mistaken for Google Maps pictures.

Combine this with the underlying simulations, and you've got a heavy game. Possibly the heaviest in 2023, depending on how far Colossal Order takes things, and that's quite the expectation considering how poorly modern PC games have been optimized. The upside is, again, that Skylines 2 doesn't need to run at a high frame rate. That isn't to say we don't care about its optimization, though. Quite the opposite!

Late-Game Optimization is Key

In fact, odds are good that Cities: Skylines 2 will run rather well on a wide range of contemporary PC hardware. At least, during the initial stages of a given simulation. Late-game progression is where things usually begin falling apart, and we've got absolutely no doubt that someone, somewhere, somehow will bring this game down to its proverbial knees. That's just the nature of the beast.  The only thing Colossal Order can do is to postpone this as much as humanly possible, and as there hasn't really been an in-depth performance overview, we can only wish them the best of luck.

Don't Forget About Mods, Either!

Back in 2020, we celebrated Cities: Skylines with an overview of some of the game's biggest, most impressive projects at the time. These were, one and all, modded. Now, it's immediately worth pointing out that effectively everyone played Cities: Skylines with mods. Whether it was just quality-of-life tweaks or extra content - it was modded. And we've got absolutely not a single doubt that this will be the case with the sequel, too.

Mods will, without doubt, affect performance negatively. It remains to be seen whether Colossal Order takes this into account or not, but given the studio's track record, they're very mod-friendly overall. Some production capacity is bound to be afforded to player-developed modifications, but it's still going to affect the game's simulation performance. Fun stuff, no doubt.

In Conclusion: It's Gonna Be Fun

In conclusion, though we don't have any hard numbers just yet, we expect that Cities: Skylines 2's hardware requirements are not overstated. Quite the opposite, in fact, as we fully expect even 7800X3D and RTX 4090Ti PCs to be brought down to their knees eventually. That's just the sort of game Skylines has always been. The sequel is extremely unlikely to change that, simply due to the nature of its gameplay.

As soon as you give players a game that affords effectively infinite simulation, they will inevitably find a way to kill their PCs' performance with it. This, we believe, is a feature rather than a bug. The player base will push the game harder than the devs have envisioned. The only thing that Colossal Order can do is optimize the simulation's scalability.

Whether that's what's the devs have been doing or not, we don't know. Cities: Skylines 2 is due to launch on October 24, though, so we won't need to wait long until true benchmarking begins. We can't wait to see what's in store for us here, and we're sure you, too, are excited to see how it pans out! Stay tuned!

READ MORE: What Does a 2023 Release Window Mean for Cities: Skylines 2?

So, here’s the jig: Cities: Skylines 2 will not be easy to run. This is a high-density, high-complexity cityscape building experience and even the original Skylines – when modded – could bring modern PCs down to their knees. Now that the sequel’s official hardware requirements have been announced, we thought it may be a good idea […]