Cities: Skylines 2 performance issues ‘not deeply rooted’ in game’s foundation, Colossal Order says

Developer clarifies the next steps in bid to stabilize performance

Addressing widespread Cities: Skylines 2 performance problems in the city-builder’s launch version, developer Colossal Order has stated that “the issues are not deeply rooted in the game’s foundation, so we fully expect to be able to improve performance going forward. The issues we are currently facing are tied to the rendering of the game.”

Colossal Order announced that it planned on pushing out a series of smaller patches and likely one bigger update to address performance issues. It further stated that it had already identified some problems connected with specific hardware setups that came unexpectedly.

Gameplay-wise, Cities: Skylines 2 is an excellent product, but performance is a little wonky :: Colossal Order / Paradox Interactive

Improvements are currently being worked on that seek to remove stutters, optimize and balance GPU performance, and further optimize CPU performance. Expanding the upscaling options for the game is another area Colossal Order is working on. Both FSR2 and DLSS2 aren’t possible to use at the moment due to some objects being incompatible with the temporal anti-aliasing technique, but the developers are “currently working towards making this possible, which will not only help to boost performances but also provide a better quality anti-aliasing solution than the one we currently use (SMAA by default).”

Talking about the goals of this post-launch optimization process, Colossal Order stated: “With the upcoming patches, the situation will largely improve with default settings. It is worth mentioning that for a game like this, the performance target is to run at a steady 30 FPS minimum. There is no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher FPS (unlike a multiplayer shooter) as a growing city will inevitably become CPU-bound. What matters more with this type of game is to avoid stutters and have a responsive UI.”

That does not mean, the company emphasized, that optimization would be stopped once that 30 FPS target has been reached.

At the end of the day it looks like not all players are affected by grave performance issues, which is often the nature with PC games – hardware setups are so different throughout the board that issues and their solutions vary a lot. Until Colossal Order has updates ready to roll out, you can use our best Cities: Skylines 2 settings to increase performance.

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