Cities Skylines 2 Abysmal Performance In Early Benchmarks, Barely 30 FPS on 4090

Cities Skylines 2 is quite a highly anticipated release for fans of the previous game and the city-building genre as a whole. On the surface, it is shaping up to be a very good city builder with lots of advanced features however deep down the game is going to launch with some severe performance problems.

Cities Skylines 2 Can’t Even Do 30 FPS High on a 4090

Recently the developers of Cities Skylines 2 made an announcement making us aware of the fact that the game will be launching with performance issues which in this day and age is just par for the course. The exact details of the poor performance weren’t made clear however with the recommended 3080 requirements for the game, it hasn’t left anyone with much confidence, and rightly so. Yesterday an article was published by pcgameshardware.de showing some early benchmarks of the game and the results are not good at all.

PCgameshardware made a test system consisting of a Core i9-11900K and an RTX 3080 which is about in line with the recommended requirements of an i5-12600K and RTX 3080. Testing at medium settings, the game ran around 15-40 fps with many “strong fluctuations. Sporadic, extremely violent jerks“. They went on further to state that even with a Core i9-13900KS and RTX 4090 the game did “not run smoothly“, no matter what GPU you used the game still experienced stutters of almost half a second.

The testers stated that “The disastrous performance of the current “work in progress” code makes us refrain from extensive benchmarks.” but have gone on to swap out the 11900K with a Ryzen 5 5600X and shared a few benchmarks for 1080p and 1440p at both the very low preset and high preset. Below is the 1440p benchmark for the game which as you can see, the RTX 4090 sits just under 30 fps at high settings.

The situation at 1080p isn’t much better at 38 FPS. One thing to note is the benchmark situation of course varies by city size which in this case was the large city shared in the screenshots and video with 40,000 population.

Oh Dear

I’m running an RTX 3090 Ti with a 3440×1440 meaning that to maybe get 60 FPS, I’ll need to drop to the lowest settings, which is a shame and even then 3440×1440 is over 1 million more pixels than 2560×1440 so 60 might not be possible at all. This is also a shame for those who are on older cards, if only the most powerful cards on the market can hold over 60 FPS at the lowest settings, there isn’t much hope for a smooth experience on anything before the 30 series. Now whilst performance isn’t the be-all and end-all for a city builder, a smooth experience is still very important for a comfortable time with the game.

With the launch coming on the 26th, there will be performance fixes at the very top of the to-do list. I’m hoping Paradox can make some solid improvements over the coming weeks but either way, I’ll probably grab it on Gamepass and see the performance for myself on launch day because paying £41.99 for this just isn’t in my book of good ideas.

If you want to see it for yourself, PCGH have a video of their benchmark on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RTX 4090.