Cities Skylines 2 low FPS and stuttering – potential fixes
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Cities Skylines 2 players are finding that the game isn’t running too well on their hardware – despite having the GPUs and CPUs that more than meet the system requirements.
As reported by Videogamer, and experienced by us as we test the game, we’re experiencing low FPS – circa 40 FPS at 1440p resolution. We are also seeing from our tests that there’s 95% CPU usage, which is incredibly high for this sort of game. This is resulting in a framerate of around 27 fps despite having an RTX 3090, in 1440p – unacceptable for this sort of game.
Elsewhere, there are reports of ‘stuttering’ that detracts from the overall experience. As of yet, there’s no news as to whether or not a patch will land, but given the severity of the issues, we fully expect developers Paradox will release one. They are yet to announce anything on their social channels.
It’s important to recognize that the last game was also hit by similar performance issues. A quick look at Steam discussions brings up complaints about the original game, Cities Skylines, getting around 30 FPS. At the time, one gamer wrote: “Yeah im rocking an NVIDIA GTX 1080 with 11gb of vram, 16gb ram, and an i7 8700k processor. im getting the same results and i can’t find out why.”
While we’re confident Paradox will fix the issue, there are a few things, if not many, that you can do in the meantime. These should both tackle the low FPS issue as well as any stuttering – although they will likely detract from the overall visual quality of the game.
Ensure your drivers are up to date
It goes without saying that you want to make sure your drivers are up to date for this game. You can find the latest Nvidia drivers here. Also, make sure you have met the minimum, or ideally recommended, system requirements for Cities Skylines 2.
Lower the quality settings
Despite having the system requirements for the game, lowering both the resolution and the quality of the visuals will improve performance – although we realize this is not ideal. In particular, you want to focus on volumetrics and global illumination, which are both expensive in terms of CPU and GPU memory. Disable the former. Elsewhere, swap Animation Quality and Texture Quality to medium and Reflections Quality to low. This will degrade the image, but the game will still be fine to look at.
In the time since the game was released, the devs have produced their own optimization guide. Here they recommend you play at 1080p, yes they don’t want you enjoying your high resolution and size screen if you’re focused on performance. Then disabling depth of field, and volumetrics is also advised. Disabling depth of field and motion blur can improve the feel of the game even if the framerate doesn’t improve too much. Dynamic resolution is the last setting mentioned and it’s suggested to turn to constant to reduce blurriness and make it look better although automatic can help performance as it adjusts your render resolution on the go.
Change to windowed full screen
We are seeing reports that playing in windowed full screen is improving performance, so this is worth a try. If you do see a boost, go back into the graphics settings and increase texture quality. Do not enable volumetric quality, as this will likely cause issues.
For now, until a patch comes along, that’s all we would recommend to do. You can also report any bugs and performance issues to Paradox, which we highly advise you to do, by visiting: forums.paradoxplaza.com. We’ll keep this page up to date if we hear of or discover any more fixes.
