Cities Skylines 2 Performance Sucks, But Can Be Easily Improved

Now I don’t say this lightly when I say that Cities Skylines 2 is the worst optimised game of 2023 and that’s pretty impressive when its competition is Atomic Heart, Redfall and Gollum… People have even been saying that on an empty map with no buildings. gamers can still barely get 20 FPS. This may be somewhat understandable if the game had Ray Tracing or Path Tracing which are some of the most demanding settings a game can have but the game doesn’t even have them I dread to think what it would be like if it did.

Cities Skylines 2 Performance

I was stunned at just how bad the game ran and I’m lucky enough to have an RTX 4090 and a powerful CPU. I feel sorry for fans of the franchise who are not so fortunate. But even with the RTX 4090 the game couldn’t even get to 60fps and GPU utilisation was at around 90%, my god did my PC make a racket, I thought it was about to take off with how fast and loud the fans were going, which they do not do with any other game.

How to Fix It?

Thankfully not all is bad as this is a city builder so you don’t need max graphics or a high fps to enjoy the game the easiest solution is to lower the settings a bit. Shocking, isn’t it? If you are insistent on keeping the game with high graphics players have found that one of the biggest offenders for the low framerate are the Depth of Field Quality, the Fog, Anti-Aliasing and Resolution Scaling, so just knock that all off or down and it should improve the game performance significantly, by about 20-40% for most systems.

Even with its poor optimisation, the game is actually really good and you can get the game on PC Games Pass. Even if you don’t like it Games Pass has much more to offer, so I would say it is worth a try and I’m sure the game will be fixed in a week or two as Paradox have been pretty up front about all this.