Paradox Interactive has released its latest city builder, Cities Skylines 2. Unfortunately, though, this is one of the worst-optimized PC games of 2023. Cities Skylines 2, even on a completely new/empty map, runs with 20fps on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 at 4K/High.
I’m truly shocked by how bad this game runs. And if this city builder used Ray Tracing or Path Tracing, I wouldn’t be complaining. We know that Ray Tracing and Path Tracing are really demanding. But no, Cities Skylines 2 does not take advantage of them. And seriously, take a look at the screenshots and video. What on Earth is pushing the RTX 4090 so hard here?
Since I’m not really good at city builders, we’ll use an empty map for our upcoming PC Performance Analysis. In other words, we’ll be doing this game a favor. Because if it performs like that on an empty map, I can’t imagine how it will run with a mid/big city. We do know that a mid-sized city runs with 7-12fps on an AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX. And if the main menu is anything to go by, then we might have an idea of the performance of a big city on an RTX4090. And look and behold. 10fps. 10fps on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX4090. That’s more demanding than Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K with Path Tracing. Man, what a mess.
Colossal Order is currently working on making the game run better. The team is optimizing/balancing the effects that affect fillrate. Thus, they’re making changes to things like Depth of Field, Global Illumination, and Volumetrics to make them work better and not slow down your game.
After further experimentation, we figured out the one setting that can cripple performance. That’s the Depth of Field Quality. By lowering it to Low, we were able to improve performance in the main menu. However, in our empty map, we could not come close to a 60fps experience. Instead, the game was running with 40fps. 40fps with this kind of visuals on an NVIDIA RTX 4090. Enough said.
As I mentioned before, we’re going to use an empty map to test how well the game runs on different computers. It wanted to test it with a medium-sized city, but the game doesn’t have a benchmark tool, and there are no pre-made cities to use. So, our benchmarks will showcase the best possible performance you can get in this city builder.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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