Cities Skylines 2 melts my RTX 3090 – Major optimizations needed
Cities Skylines 2 is so poorly optimized that even the 3090 isn't up to the challenge.
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Cities Skylines 2 melts my RTX 3090. I was excited for the release of the long-awaited sequel to the best city-builder that ever existed, so you can imagine my surprise when I was getting FPS numbers in the 20s just in the Menu. I distinctly remember the performance being an issue when the first Citied: Skylines launched, but surely, they have learned from their mistakes. It would appear not.
This isn’t a review, it’s more of a showcase. I’m here to outline my disappointment with the performance of Cities: Skylines 2, overall the gameplay is fantastic, and the graphics are great, if you don’t mind playing a slideshow.
The RTX 3090 struggles to run Cities: Skylines 2
This isn’t an issue with the 3090, or the latest Nvidia drivers, as we outlined in our Cities: Skylines 2 FPS fix page, even on the latest drivers, the RTX 3090 struggles. But to be fair to them, Nvidia is yet to release a driver for Cities: Skylines 2 specifically. Even so, we should not be seeing sights like this, in a relatively low-intensity simulation game.
This was the state of my game in a relatively empty city, in fact, I’d just started, so the city was empty. As you can see, my Ryzen 9 5900X – yes, I know, I’m due an upgrade, and my RTX 3090 struggle to hit 30 FPS. It seems as though there are some major GPU leaks or optimization issues that need to be addressed.
The good news is the developers, Paradox Interactive, have addressed the issues and have made the performance issues experienced by players their top priority. We should have known something was up when we noticed the hefty reccomneded system requirements stated by the Cities Skylines 2 Steam page.
The good news
The good news is, that there are things you can do to boost the performance of the game, whist we await the developers to fix the performance of the game, and Nvidia to release a new driver. We have covered them here in our Optimization page.
