How to improve FPS in Cities: Skylines II (PC)
Cities: Skylines II is Colossal Order's city-management simulator that, in October 2023, was the star of one of the most technically troubled launches in recent PC gaming history: not even an RTX 4090 could sustain a stable 60 FPS in medium-to-large cities. The cause wasn't graphical, it was architectural: the game individually simulates every "cim" (citizen), with their own daily routine, job, vehicle, and route calculated in real time, instead of aggregating traffic and population the way the original Cities: Skylines did. This guide covers what settings actually move the needle in 2026, after several rounds of Colossal Order optimization patches throughout 2024 and 2025.
This is what you'd gain with a NVIDIA RTX 3050
Want the RTX 3050 at the best price?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +46% free FPS.
Object LOD Distance / Render Distance
Building and prop render distance has a combined CPU and GPU impact larger than expected in big cities, because the engine keeps calculating LODs for thousands of simultaneous objects. Lowering it from Ultra/High to Medium frees up a noticeable amount of frames.
Volumetric Clouds
Volumetric clouds are one of the game's most GPU-expensive effects, a leftover from the poor optimization at launch. Disabling them or lowering to Low frees up several milliseconds of GPU frametime, especially at 1440p and 4K.
Ambient Occlusion
High-quality AO adds a costly post-processing pass that contributes little perceptible visual value in a game viewed from an elevated management camera.
Vehicle and Pedestrian Detail
There's a separate graphics setting from the number of simulated agents that controls the visual detail level of rendered vehicles and pedestrians. Lowering it doesn't change how many cims the game simulates, but it does reduce the rendering load of individual models.
Shadow Quality/Distance
Dynamic shadows from buildings and vegetation at long distances consume GPU bandwidth disproportionately in dense cities.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
City size / Cims limit
The determining performance factor isn't resolution or graphics, but the number of citizens, vehicles, and routes the CPU is individually simulating in real time. A city of 50,000 residents can run twice as fast as one of 150,000 with the exact same graphics settings.
Texture Quality
On GPUs with little VRAM, textures on Ultra can cause constant streaming from system memory, generating microstutter on top of lower FPS.
Anti-Aliasing
The default high-quality TAA adds a notable post-processing load and, in versions prior to the 2024 patches, introduced visible ghosting on moving vehicles.
Screen Space Reflections
Full-screen reflections, used mainly on water and wet surfaces, have a high GPU cost for their contribution to a city-management viewpoint.
Simultaneous Info Views
Keeping several info views active at once (traffic, pollution, land value) adds extra CPU calculations on top of an already demanding simulation.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS 3
+35% FPSDLSS wasn't available at the October 2023 launch and was added via patch throughout 2024 after community pressure over the terrible initial performance. In Quality mode it offers the best balance of performance and sharpness at 1440p and 4K, including Frame Generation on RTX 40.
AMD FSR 2/3
+25% FPSFSR was implemented alongside DLSS as part of the post-launch performance-accessibility improvements. The quality gap between FSR and native resolution is more noticeable than with DLSS, especially in Balanced mode, but it's still a valid option.
Intel XeSS
+22% FPSAdded in a later phase of compatibility updates, XeSS mainly benefits Intel Arc GPUs and offers a reasonable alternative on hardware without DLSS support.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable DLSS in Quality mode as your first move before touching graphics sliders: in Cities: Skylines II, upscaling recovers more performance per effort than lowering settings one by one.
- •On RTX 40-series cards, enable Frame Generation only once your city is already running above ~50 base FPS, since with very low base FPS it introduces noticeable latency.
- •Keep drivers updated after every game patch: NVIDIA has released specific Game Ready profiles coinciding with the major 2024 performance updates.
AMD
- •Use FSR in Quality mode and avoid Performance except in very large cities, since the blurring effect is more visible in this game's typical aerial urban view.
- •AMD GPUs with less than 8GB of VRAM should lower Texture Quality to Medium before any other setting.
- •Check that Smart Access Memory (SAM) is enabled in the BIOS alongside a compatible Ryzen processor.
Sistema
- •The CPU is this game's real bottleneck: prioritize a processor with good single-thread frequency and enough cores before investing in more GPU.
- •Use an SSD (preferably NVMe) to reduce loading times and asset streaming in large cities.
- •Have at least 16GB of RAM, ideally 32GB, if you play large cities: the game is known for high memory usage that can cause stuttering from paging.
5. Known game issues
October 2023 launch with unacceptable performance
At launch, Cities: Skylines II couldn't sustain a stable 60 FPS even on an RTX 4090 in medium-to-large cities, generating a strong negative reaction and mixed Steam reviews. Colossal Order publicly acknowledged the problem and delayed DLC content to focus resources exclusively on optimization.
Estado: Progressive improvements across 2024 and 2025 performance patches (not fully resolved)
FPS degradation proportional to city size
Unlike most games, in Cities: Skylines II FPS drops nearly linearly with the number of individually simulated citizens. A city over 100,000-150,000 residents remains a performance challenge in 2026, even on high-end hardware.
Memory leaks and stuttering in long sessions
Prolonged play sessions in large cities have historically reported progressively increasing RAM usage and microstutter, partially mitigated by improved memory-management patches.
Estado: Partially mitigated in 2024-2025 updates
6. Frequently asked questions
Why does my city run smoothly at first but lose FPS as it grows?▾
Does Cities: Skylines II have DLSS and FSR in 2026?▾
Is it worth buying a powerful GPU if the problem is the CPU?▾
Has performance really improved since launch?▾
Want to know exactly how many FPS YOUR PC will get?
Enter your GPU and CPU in our calculator and measure the real impact of each setting.
Calculate FPS for Cities: Skylines II →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →