Best Cities Skylines 2 settings for max fps and performance (2024)

What are the best Cities Skylines 2 settings?Early reports suggest that the PC performance on Cities Skylines 2 isn’t where it should be, and our testing unfortunately confirms this. We struggled to get any real consistency out of the game but did eventuallydetermine what the best graphical and gameplay settings were for the testing rig we used.

Cities Skylines 2’s system requirements have been through a few revisions in the lead-up to release, and much has been said about its download size, given the comparison to the original game, so this makes the initial performance issues all the more disappointing.

Here are the best settings for Cities Skylines 2 on PC:

Best video settings for Cities Skylines 2

  • VSync –Enabled
  • Performance preference – Frame rate
  • Dynamic resolution scale – Automatic
  • Anti-Aliasing quality – High SMAA
  • Global illumination – Medium
  • Reflections quality –Medium
  • Motion blur – disabled
  • Shadow Quality –Medium
  • Terrain quality –Medium
  • Level of Detail – Medium
  • Animation quality –Medium
  • Texture quality – High

There is no benchmark tool built into Cities Skylines 2, so our testing was purely done on the basis of monitoring performance and carefully adjusting settings to improve it. With the above settings, we were able to get around70 fps as an average but this was far from stable. Regardless of what settings we tested, whether it was a low preset or a custom configuration aiming for the best visual fidelity, there were always stability issues with Cities Skylines 2. Here are the key settings we changed throughout our testing.

Performance preference

While the performance preference option didn’t appear to limit or change any of the other visual settings we had in place, selecting this over balanced or simulation speed got us the closest to stability during our time testing Cities Skylines 2. However, this option sits in the general menu, not with the rest of the video settings.

Level of detail

A game like Cities Skylines has a surprising amount of detail to process, albeit not on the level of an open-world RPG, but still, there are benefits to squeezing as much quality out as possible. As we went through the settings, trying to wrangle a few extra frames, reducing our level of detail had a considerable positive impact, upping the average fps by around 10. While the overall number was still inconsistent, after reducing the level of detail, the drops were less frequent.

Anti-Aliasing

If you like smooth edges, anit-aliasing is your friend. We not only enabled AA, but had it set to high SMAA (subpixel morphological anti-aliasing). This places the responsibility for AA on the GPUto detect jagged edges and smooth them out. FXAA, Nvidia’s proprietary AA tech was an option but caused some blurring issues up close which is common, so SMAA was the way to go, and performance-wise, there was no impact of moving up to high rather than low SMAA.

Best gameplay settings for Cities Skylines 2

There are a few gameplay settings that you may want to consider changing in Cities Skylines 2 for the optimal experience.

  • Start paused – Yes
  • Edge scrolling – Yes
  • Day/night visuals -Yes
  • UI Transparency – 60%
  • Temperature format – Farenheight
  • Other units – US

Most of these settings are just box-ticking to ensure they’re enabled. The change to the UI transparency just helps with the immersion but everything is still more than visible and easy to identify.

For us, the game loaded with Celcius as the temperature and metric for the other units, again, change these if your preference suits. The only real option that, to us, is crucial to have on, is ‘start paused’. This ensures that any time to load a game, it is automatically paused to allow you some time to gather your thoughts before diving into gameplay.

What we use to test gaming settings

At PCGamesN, we like to use specific gaming rigs to test out the best video settings for performance in the latest releases. Currently, our test rigs include the following components;IntelCore i7 11700F,MSIVentusNvidiaGeForce RTX 3070, 32GB of DDR4 3200MHz RAM, MSI B560 motherboard. We also test using Widows 11 64-bit.

We use the same rigs to ensure that every game we test is done under fair conditions against the same hardware. We will occasionally upgrade these rigs to ensure they don’t fall behind the market and this allows us to aim for the highest quality possible in every game we test.

Can Cities Skylines 2 be played using an HDD?

Cities Skylines 2can not be played on an HDD. Storing the game on our HDD and booting it up worked, in the sense that the game loaded, but it was impossible to even navigate the main menudue to the lag being so bad.

You can upgrade to one of the best gaming SSDs to overcome this hurdle, as many future game releases will also start to shut down their support for the old-school drive.

How to monitor performance in Cities Skylines 2

If you want to keep an eye on performance in Cities Skylines 2, there is a simple way to do this depending on whether you’re using an Nvidia or AMD graphics card.

For Nvidia cards, ensure you have GeForce Experience installed and the in-game overlay enabled, and then simply hit ALT + R in-game to bring up your performance monitor.

With AMD cards, you can enable performance monitoring via the Radeonoverlay using the shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + O.

Check out our Cities Skylines 2 review for our verdict on Paradox’s latest building sim. If you need to upgrade your hardware in preparation for launch, looking at the best graphics cards is always a good place to start.

Best Cities Skylines 2 settings for max fps and performance (2024)

FAQs

How to get high fps in Cities Skylines 2? ›

How To Improve Low FPS
  1. Enable Fullscreen Windowed Mode.
  2. Disable V-Sync.
  3. Disable Motion Blur.
  4. Disable Volumetrics Quality.
  5. Disable Depth Of Field Mode.
Nov 18, 2023

What settings should I use for Cities Skylines 2? ›

Below is a list of recommended settings to help you optimize the best possible performance for Cities: Skylines 2.
  • Screen Resolutions: 1920x 1080 x 60Hz.
  • VSync: On.
  • Depth of Field Mode: Disabled.
  • Dynamic Resolution Scale Quality: Disabled.
  • Anti-aliasing Quality: Low SMAA.
  • Clouds Quality Settings: Disabled / Low.
Nov 4, 2023

How to make Cities: Skyline 2 less laggy? ›

Go to graphic setting and Disable "Depth of Field Mode" , this will rapidly increase your low fps. Disable Global Illumination and change level of detail to medium or low. Another bonus fps disable Terrain Casts Shadows and Fog quality.

What FPS is Cities Skylines 2? ›

Cities: Skylines 2 devs designed the game to target 30 fps because 'there's no real benefit to aim for higher'

Is City Skylines 2 optimized? ›

The results are narrow, but overall, more players say that Cities Skylines 2's performance has improved. Of 1,917 respondents, 38% say that Cities Skylines 2 performance is now 'good. ' 33.3% say that the simulation is still slow, while 28.7% say there are still issues with the game's frame rate.

Why is Cities Skylines 2 so slow? ›

So why is Cities: Skylines 2 so incredibly heavy on the GPU? The short answer is that the game is throwing so much unnecessary geometry at the graphics card that the game manages to be largely limited by the available rasterization performance.

Is city Skylines 2 CPU or GPU intensive? ›

I noticed that the main performance load is on the graphics card. It's always kind of unfortunate when the graphics card is running at 100% and the CPU has nothing to do.

What are the best specs for Cities Skylines 2? ›

  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system.
  • OS: Windows® 10 Home 64 Bit | Windows® 11.
  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-12600K | AMD® Ryzen™ 7 5800X.
  • Memory: 16 GB RAM.
  • Graphics: Nvidia® GeForce™ RTX 3080 (10 GB) | AMD® Radeon™ RX 6800 XT (16 GB)
  • Storage: 60 GB available space.

How to improve graphics in Cities Skylines 2? ›

I'll elaborate on each point below:
  1. Switch from 'Fullscreen' to 'Windowed Fullscreen' (or vice-versa)
  2. Set 'Depth of Field Mode' to 'Disabled'
  3. Set 'Volumetrics Quality' to 'Disabled'
  4. Set 'Level of Detail' to Very Low.
  5. Turn motion blur off.
Oct 24, 2023

Does Cities: Skylines 2 still have performance issues? ›

While some stuttering issues remain, no longer does Skylines 2 leave the mightiest graphics cards weeping in the bathtub, and it seems to cope better with CPUs that come in below the recommend Intel Core i5-12600K.

Is city Skylines 2 demanding? ›

Cities: Skylines II review: SimCity on steroids The game is a marvel for anyone craving a hit of SimCity-style urban planning. It's also graphically demanding and occasionally overwhelming.

Why is Cities: Skylines so CPU intensive? ›

The CPU usage will go up accordingly because of the agent simulation going on, the GPU will go up because of all the visuals and textures having to be rendered at one time, and the RAM... Well, basically does what RAM usually does. Storing temporary data. So, yes.

How to get Cities Skylines 2 to run smoothly? ›

Cities: Skylines 2's bottleneck is generally the GPU, so anything you can turn down in terms of visuals will be a boon. Another setting adjustment we had some success with is putting “Motion Blur” on “Disabled.” Motion Blur is rather aggressive in the game anyway and disabling it seems to take some strain away.

Is city Skylines 2 locked at 30 FPS? ›

The target is 30fps because of the nature of the game, (arguably) there are no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher FPS (unlike a multiplayer shooter) as a growing city with inevitably become CPU bound,” he said. “What matters more with this type of game is to avoid stutters, and have responsive UI.”

Does Cities Skylines 2 have DLSS? ›

Cities Skylines 2 now has support for Nvidia DLSS 2, and while you won't need one of the best graphics cards to use it, you will need to be using any RTX graphics card to benefit.

Does Cities Skylines 2 support FSR? ›

And maybe it's not as high-priority, but it befuddles me that a game of Skylines 2's stature still only offers AMD FSR 1.0 as a third-party upscaling options. Never mind DLSS, there are currently two, both much better versions of FSR to upgrade to. Two and a bit, even, once FSR 3.1 launches later this year.

How to enable developer mode in Cities Skylines 2? ›

Enabling developer mode
  1. Right-click the game, open Properties.
  2. Add -developerMode to the Launch Options at the bottom.

How do I increase my fps to max? ›

Here are the best tricks to increase FPS on your Windows 10 gaming machine:
  1. Enable Game Mode in Windows 11 and Windows 10.
  2. Lower your resolution.
  3. Change your game's video settings.
  4. Update your graphics card drivers.
  5. Remove unused programs and bloatware.
  6. Boost your Wi-Fi.
  7. Adjust your monitor's refresh rate.
Nov 21, 2023

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