HomeHardwareFeaturesCities: Skylines II
After six months of renovations, Cities: Skylines 2 performance is considerably less terribleSome GPUs get more than double the frames since launch
Some GPUs get more than double the frames since launch
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Six months is a long time. In that half-year you could fully grow a patch of delicious strawberries, plant the seeds, then grow another. Or you could squirm through three and a half successive Liz Truss premierships. Or, asCities: Skylines 2developers Colossal Order have done, you could take thetechnical messof your long-awaited citybuilding game and reconstruct it into something that performs… okay, notwell, butbetter.
A patch that added character LODs (level of detail, basically lower-res civilian models that appear when they’re far away) was also released in December 2023. You might recall that the missing LODs, which were definitely an issue, sparked rumours of civvies killing performance with their terrifyingly over-detailed teeth, whichmay not have been.
Here’s how a few different GPUs fared at launch versus the current 1.1.1f1 version, all sharing the RPS test rig’s Core i5-11600K and 16GB of RAM:
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
This is also not to say that Colossal Order can ditch the hi-vis jackets and call their performance works finished. Average framerates aside, Cities: Skylines 2 still suffers from plenty of stuttering, especially when zooming in to admire all your busy little denizens and their reassuringly normal teeth. 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 mindDLSS, there are currently two, bothmuchbetterversions of FSR to upgrade to. Two and a bit, even, once FSR 3.1 launches later this year.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive
I was also surprised to find that, despite the proportionally mahoosive performance gains since launch, making individual settings changes (as opposed to just flicking through the presets) is a less effective tactic for wringing out higher framerates. Back in October, swapping High quality for the optimal settings I’d picked out could get the RTX 4060 from 17fps to 36fps at 1080p. As of this morning, the same settings got it from 36fps to 49fps, a smaller improvement in both percentage and straight FPS terms.
Still, at least the overall polishing job makes such tactical tweaking less vital to begin with. As a citybuilding scrub whose utility management game is kinda weak, I can’t best say if the past six months have healed the more fundamental issues that players have had had with Cities: Skylines 2, which ourreviewerSin said “offers little that feels substantially new or improved enough to warrant a sequel.” But performance, for sure, is getting the improvements it so desperately needed.
