Cities: Skylines 2 Studio Insists Performance Problems Are “Not Deeply Rooted in the Game’s Foundation”

Developer Colossal Order has revealed its plans for post-launch support of the recently-released city builder Cities: Skylines 2. In a post on the game’s official forums, community manager c_avanya kicked things off by talking about how the performance issues suffered by Cities: Skylines 2 are “not deeply rooted in the game’s foundation.”

The post offers a number of options to help improve performance of the game, which include playing the game at 1080p, disabling options like Depth of Field and Volumetrics, and reducing Global Illumination. The studio has provided a full guide for tinkering around with the game’s graphics settings to squeeze better performance out of the title.

Moving forward, Colossal Order plans to release a number of small patches targeting different parts of Cities: Skylines 2‘s host of performance problems. Currently, the studio is working on improvements to a number of things, and with patches, hopes to remove stutters from the game, optimise and balance GPU performance, and push out CPU optimisations.

The studio is also looking it more upscaling options. Out of the box, Cities: Skylines 2 comes with AMD FSR1. According to the post, the game does not include FSR2 or Nvidia’s DLSS because the newer technologies need the use of Temporal Anti-aliasing, which apparently isn’t possible in the game’s engine right now because of some of its objects being incompatible with the technique.

The post reiterates the studio’s target of achieving a framerate of 30FPS, stating that the genre doesn’t really benefit from aiming for a higher framerate. It does, however, state that the studio might go for higher framerates down the line, especially since it would help the game’s visuals as well.

Capping off the post, the studio talks about why it released Cities: Skylines 2 when it did, despite the game clearly being not ready for release owing to its large amounts of performance issues. The studio apparently concluded that performance issues weren’t a dealbreaker for all players.

“For us, the number one priority is for the players to have fun with the game, and we had seen enough feedback from players enjoying the game that it would be more unfair to postpone,” says the post.