Cities: Skylines 2 system requirements

You might have heard that Cities: Skylines 2 requires a beast of a machine to run. While my PC is hardly an apex predator, it is pretty beastly. It runs things okay, but there are some graphical quirks that have me puzzled.

Nonetheless, here are the requirements the developer, Colossal Order, suggests that you have.

Minimum:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows 10 Home 64 Bit
• Processor: Intel Core i7-6700K | AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 (4 GB) | AMD Radeon RX 480 (8 GB)
• Storage: 60 GB available space

Recommended

• 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

Note that the recommended requirements probably won’t get you 60fps at 4K resolution. Colossal Order has stated that their target framerate is 30fps, as they believe that should be sufficient for a city builder. If you’re having trouble, here are some optimization tips.

However, they have stated that improving performance is one of their first orders of business after release. It’s perhaps unlikely to expect the recommended specs to drop after optimization, but at the very least, if your hardware falls somewhere between the minimum and recommended requirements, you’ll see better performance yields.