Cities: Skylines 2 has had a rocky launch, currently sporting an embarrassing Mixed rating from Steam user reviews, largely due to poor performance. To help put out these fires, Paradox Interactive and developer Colossal Order have issued a statement on the official Paradox Forums, written by Community Manager co_avanya.
The statement addresses the poor performance and provides some tweaks on how to fix them, while also detailing post-launch patches and updates.
Earlier this month, we shared a note on performance as we had not reached the benchmark target we had set for the game. Following this, we have seen some concerns about performance and what it means for the game as a whole. We’d like to give some context to the issues the game is currently facing, what we’re doing to address them, and what you can do if you are among the players experiencing performance issues.
We want to assure you that the issues are not deeply rooted in the game’s foundation, so we fully expect to be able to improve performance going forward. […] Following the release, we intend to push a series of small patches (and likely a big one) as we significantly improve different areas of performance.
The quick tips to improve performance are as follows:
- Reduce screen resolution to 1080p
- Disable Depth of Field and Volumetrics
- Reduce Global Illumination
All of which are pretty obvious if you know your graphics settings, but helpful if you don’t. A more detailed guide to tweaking various in-game settings can be found at this Forum Post — Tips: Our Guide to Optimize Performance.
Patches are coming to help fix certain issues, such as removing stuttering and optimizing GPU performance.
The developers note that the goal is for the big city builder to run at a steady 30 frames per second: “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. For that reason, our simulation is also built around an expected update rate given 30fps.”
Cities: Skylines 2 is available on PC. It’s coming next year to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. It’s rated E for Everyone.
