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The heavily anticipated Cities Skylines 2 is now out and available to enjoy. The first game is a beloved city-builder masterpiece, meanwhile, the sequel is, unfortunately, suffering from significant performance issues. To help resolve these performance woes, the developer has shared an official optimization guide for the best Cities Skylines 2 graphics and gameplay settings.
While admittedly suffering from issues on PC, we were positive towards Cities Skylines 2 in our review. It’s a smart renovation over a sweeping revolution, and there are no other city builders that can match its sheer freedom and choice. This freedom allows you to play God and build your own utopia with more new features and differences compared to the first game.
It is a fantastic simulator, but the PC version is ruined by technical problems. Fortunately, the developer’s optimization guide should help you fix some of the issues.
Cities Skylines 2 optimization guide
Cities Skylines 2 developer, Colossal Order, has shared an official guide to the best graphics and gameplay settings. Below are the best graphics settings according to the developer:
- Screen resolution – 1920x1280x60Hz
- Display mode – Fullscreen Windowed
- VSync – On
- Game cursor mode – Free
- Depth of field mode – Disabled
- Global graphics quality – Custom
- Dynamic resolution scale quality – Disabled
- Anti-aliasing quality – Low SMAA
- Clouds quality setting – Medium
- Fog quality settings – Enabled
- Volumetrics quality settings – Disabled
- Ambient occlusion quality – Medium
- Global illumination quality – Medium
- Reflections quality – Medium
- Motion blur – Disabled
- Shadow quality – Medium
- Terrain quality settings – Medium
- Water quality settings – Medium
- Level of detail – Very low
- Animation quality – Medium
In addition to all of the above settings, the developer has also discussed Virtual Texturing. They explain that this technology ‘uses video memory more efficiently in regards to textures,’ and ‘during the time that the game is processing the textures, the buildings might turn dark or have some other graphical artefacts’. Depending on the hardware of your computer, the time it takes for builds to render can differ, but it should be no longer than a minute.
If the above settings do not work, we have posted our own Cities Skylines 2 best graphics settings and recommendations. We have also discussed how you can fix lag, stuttering, and low FPS. In other Cities Skylines 2 guides, here is how to buy more land to expand your city limits, and here is how to connect power lines.
