Cities: Skylines 2 Recommended Settings to improve performance

The city-building sequel from developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive is now live, and hurdles concerning Cities Skylines 2 performance woes and optimization are the talk of the town. For those of you trying to make it run a little better on PC, we’ve got suggestions.

Also, remember to check back as patches targeting optimizations for Cities Skylines 2 go live. These settings may change drastically between hotfixes, and what works now could always break later.

Best performance settings on PC

Colossal Order acknowledged Cities Skylines 2 may struggle with performance early on, and I noted some of those challenges for our review in progress. Unfortunately, even with rigs on the beefier end, your PC won’t yield the most photogenic scenery. While the community waits on performance updates, I’ll offer a few settings you can tweak to improve the experience for now.

Following launch, the studio also added its own optimization guide for Cities Skylines 2 performance. We’ve tweaked the settings below to reflect those recommendations, along with notes on what may be helpful for those still struggling.

Cities Skylines 2 optimal settings:

• Screen Resolution: 1920 x 1080 x 60 Hz
• Display Mode: Fullscreen Windowed
  • Typically, games in Windowed Mode impact performance to varying degrees
• Depth of Field: Disabled
• Volumetrics Quality Settings: Medium
• Global Illumination: Enable
  • May cause flickering if disabled
• Motion Blur: Disabled
• Shadow Quality: Low
• Level of Detail: Very Low
  • Appears to impact visuals very little

These are all easier to find in the Cities Skylines 2 simple graphics settings. I’d recommend dropping all of those down, no matter the PC build, for now at least. While some of those are caused by specific issues I’ve encountered, a general bit of PC gaming advice is to drop the more taxing elements like shadows, if I a game is giving you problems. And despite my current setup, I never play anything with Motion Blur unless it’s helpful while playing in camera modes.

Cities Skylines 2 performance patch plans

Hopefully, future updates will improve the situation so you can crank up settings taking a performance hit from messy optimization. For now, Colossal Order says it’s working on improving the game from its messy launch state. In a recent AMA, the studio explained it’s prioritizing performance patches for Cities Skylines 2, and immediate action players can take to fix their experience while they wait.

On October 24, shortly after launch, Colossal Order detailed more of that performance roadmap on the Paradox forums. While the developer’s comments over maintaining 30fps drew community ire, community manager co_avanya explained, “What matters more with this type of game is to avoid stutters and have a responsive UI.”