Settling on the best Cities Skylines 2 settings for performance is a bit of a tricky task. The simulation game‘s settings themselves aren’t that complex, though the advanced toolset does give you more control than most PC games over how to tailor your experience. The challenge comes from Cities Skylines 2’s launch state, which is not just a mess, but a confusing one. One person’s settings might bump the framerate up to 30 fps, while the same settings do absolutely nothing for another. Quality and upscaling frequently have no measurable effect on performance as well, but since your experience may vary, treat these as a baseline to start from while you experiment.
For reference, I used an RTX 3070 with 16GB of RAM and a 12th-gen i7 CPU.
Cities Skylines 2 settings - The important stuff
Before getting into a list of settings and toggles, I’ll just say what actually made the most significant change for me. Some reviewers noted that turning Depth of Field mode off entirely helped improve their fps, but it made no difference for me. I did toggle the Depth of Field quality to low, though, and got a pretty hefty boost from 13 fps to 30 fps without any noticeable change in the actual visual quality.
I also turned motion blur off and global illumination quality off had a small fps boost for my trouble. Motion blur adds very little to the experience, and while global illumination theoretically governs the general lighting quality, but I noticed barely any change between high, medium, and low settings. TL;DR, you’re not missing anything by dropping it to low.
A few other oddities worth noting involve the texture and visual quality options. You’d think high anti-aliasing might drop performance a little, but it didn’t. It smoothes out textures up close, so if you’re wanting to zoom in and follow your city at street level, try toggling it to high and see what happens.
The shadow, water, and terrain quality options have no noticeable effect, and neither did texture quality or level of detail. I turned both to high and still had a fairly stable 30-35 fps with random jumps to 50 fps or slightly higher for a bit.
Cities Skylines 2 settings
These settings got me a fairly steady 30fps, give or take a few bizarre jumps. Given how unpredictable Cities Skylines 2 has been for reviewers, including me, just keep in mind that your experience may differ.
- Display mode: Fullscreen
- Depth of field mode: Physical
- Global graphics quality: Custom (I didn’t adjust these)
- Dynamic resolution scale: Automatic
- Anti-aliasing quality: High SMAA
- Cloud quality: Medium
- Fog quality: Medium
- Volumetrics quality: medium
- Ambient Occlusion quality: Medium
- Global illumination quality: Low
- Reflection quality: Medium
- Depth of field quality: Low
- Motion blur: disabled
- Shadow quality: Medium
- Terrain quality: Medium
- Water quality: Medium
- Level of detail: High
- Animation quality: Medium
- Texture quality: High
Those last three might vary for you, though since they didn’t seem to influence performance, I just kept them on medium and high to enjoy the benefits.
Cities Skylines 2 gameplay settings
There’s only one really significant setting under the gameplay tab: Day/night visuals.
- Edge scrolling: On
- Day/night visuals: Depends on preference
- Start paused: On
- Show tutorials: On
When night falls, you can’t really see anything in your city except what the dim streetlights illuminate unless you enter one of the planning menus, where the screen turns grey. If you toggle day/night “off,” the sun stays up for the whole 24-hour cycle.
And under the general tab, you can adjust the autosave setting so it saves more frequently if you need it to.
Alongside Cities Skylines 2 DLC, you can expect performance updates to help smooth all this out in the future.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
