Don’t forget the mods! They make a big difference IMO.

The default settings are definitely a large contributer there. Once you change a handful, it should be better. Worth mentioning though, there is still a noticable performance drop as the city gets larger, supposedly the biggest drop is early on ie 0 population to 2000 or so, from what I’ve heard.

CityPlannerPlays has a video up for what settings are important to play. Personally I will mention that in the “advanced” settings you can change the AA to “TAA” which should be better than the others, it’s just hidden in the normal menu. I imagine DigitalFoundry will have a in-depth performance/settings video up sometime soonish, but I have no idea for sure.

Edit: if I had working eyes, I would have seen that they put their own suggestions in the steam post as well. Either way, worth checking out CPP for addition info I guess.

most people aren’t interested in sub 60 FPS, especially if it’s at 1080p

Hate to say it but this is a city building sim. Above 60fps would be amazing, but Cities Skylines 1 was already known for being… not great for frame pacing or frame rates.

Obviously more is better, but you can look at any similar game and get fairly understanding “oh only 37 FPS in CS1/CIV6/Rise of Industry/Urbek City Builder/Satisfactory/Dyson Sphere Program, that’s pretty solid.” The only (similar-ish) game I can think of that actually has never had bad performance is “Per Aspera”, but every single other one mentioned, I have had performance “desires/issues.” I could also throw rimworld and dwarf fortress in there but those are different enough to be questionably relevant, but those too have performance problems at different points in time.

That being said, it does not sound like the Devs intentionally hid this info, the content creators did mention early on there were performance issues and that Paradox was aiming to have them resolved. If there was any intentional hiding, it would be probably from Paradox as the publisher, but they seem to be relatively open this time around in regards to information.

TLDR: Low fps in genre ain’t that surprising, most are used to it. Obviously more is better, but they seem to be at least intent on addressing it, unlike some other devs.

From the couple of creators I’ve seen paying it, they were aware of some performance issues for sure. I think they were just unaware at how severe the impact was (since content creators normally have expensive PC’s) and how quickly they’d be able to address it.

It never sounded like they were aiming for being super optimised at launch either, but it did seem like they were confident “most” would be able to play it prior to the announcement.

And having watched CityPlannerPlays performance video of it, it sounds like the article didn’t really play around with things to see what different settings’ impact was. Specifically regarding resolution, it was noted that anything above 1080p seems to be extremely poor in performance.

Why there’s no DLSS / FSR also at launch is baffling, it helps GPU bottlenecked necked games greatly (even if boosting from a native 30 to 60 is a bit yuck)

I believe I had heard something about them having issues with getting it running, because for some reason they included their own “render scale” option that runs like ass. You can, fortunately enough, very easily add DLSS to most games even if they don’t natively support it though. That’s most likely what I will be doing.

That’s what I was thinking. I know releases have been delayed on GamePass before, but I’m also not sure how easily that is done. The couple content creators I saw seemed to have what would be “normal” FPS for C:S1, so maybe CO is willing to release like that as the player base is already used to it, then optimise later. Could be completely wrong, but I hope not.

Bro I AM the 9 elephants gassing someone.

Damn bro who siracha’d your taint today? Maybe you should go outside for a breather.