Don’t buy it right away, we’ll explain why

The city-building game published by Paradox Interactive is experiencing a difficult start on PC, due to the unacceptable level of performance for many players.

It is one of the most anticipated games of the year by fans of management games: Cities skyline 2 It has been available on Steam and Game Pass since October 24th. The game has already been a huge success with over 100,000 simultaneous players at peak attendance.

However, this version was marred by major performance issues. We have tested and confirmed the game.

Cities Skylines 2: 15 fps on GeForce RTX 4080

Many players reported a very disappointing level of performance at once Cities skyline 2 Spear. We were able to try this out: On a PC with a Core i9-13900K and GeForce RTX 4080 at 4K resolution and maximum settings, we barely reached 15 fps at the start of the game.

We do not show any buildings, or simulate any traffic or systems that may occupy resources on the processor or even the graphics card. We’re just zooming in on… a tree. However, the €1,400 GPU runs at full speed. Could this be the greediest tree in the history of video games?

The performance level is clearly higher at 1440p (about 40 fps) and at 1080p (about 80 fps). But there’s clearly something wrong with the technical base of Colossal Order.

a Official optimization guide It was announced by the studio on the game’s Steam page, with recommendations on specific options to deactivate, such as depth of field or volumetric quality. Without these settings, the graphical presentation of the game will obviously be poor.

As a last resort, you can enable dynamic resolution, which is based on AMD’s FSR1. Once enabled, performance increases by about five-fold, but then the game starts flashing to display every temporal artifact it can.

By the studio’s admission, this is a temporary solution before the arrival of FSR2 and also Nvidia’s DLSS solution, which are solutions forUpgrade This will greatly improve performance as well as image quality.

A paradox already at work

editor Cities skyline 2, Paradox Interactive, had already spoken out before the game’s release, admitting that the teams had not met their performance goals. This observation apparently did not cause a delay in the launch, which would have been very beneficial for the game.

today, Paradox spoke again on Steam By evoking its original intent, which was to run the game at 30 frames per second:

It’s worth noting that for a game of this type, the performance goal is to run at least 30 frames per second. In a city building game, there’s no real advantage to aiming for a higher frame rate (unlike a multiplayer shooter), because a growing city is bound to saturate your CPU.

But this does not mean that the studio will ignore technical improvements. In the same press release, we learn that the developer is already working on reducing jerks and improving the loading of the most demanding settings on the graphics card as well as on the processor.

But in the current situation, we cannot advise you to buy Cities: Skylines IIUnless you agree to run it at 1080p or at minimum settings.