Best Cities Skylines 2 PC Settings 2026: Fix Stuttering

Cities: Skylines 2 is one of the most hardware-demanding city-builders ever released. Even players with mid-range and high-end GPUs regularly report stuttering, frame drops, and city-wide slowdowns as populations grow. The root cause is often not the GPU at all — CS2 places exceptional demands on the CPU through traffic pathfinding, resident simulation, and level-of-detail calculations that scale directly with city size. The graphics settings that work in other games may still leave you with a stuttering city unless you account for the simulation layer. This guide covers every impactful setting, recommended values by GPU tier, the LOD adjustment that resolves most stuttering reports, and a complete settings table for both 1080p and 1440p play. For the general framework of how PC game settings interact with hardware, see our PC settings optimization guide.

Why Cities: Skylines 2 Stutters

Cities: Skylines 2 runs on Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), a physically-based renderer built for visual fidelity. HDRP introduces several computationally expensive rendering passes — global illumination, volumetric lighting, and high-resolution shadow cascades — that are heavier than the engines used by comparable open-world games. The baseline rendering cost is higher than most titles at equivalent visual settings, which means the same GPU that runs other games at Ultra may struggle with CS2 at Medium-High.

The second factor is the simulation engine. Cities: Skylines 2 simulates individual resident and worker pathfinding at a scale far beyond the original Cities: Skylines. Traffic pathfinding is processed primarily on a single CPU thread, creating a hard performance ceiling as city populations pass 50,000–80,000 residents. This produces a classic CPU bottleneck: the GPU sits at 60–70% utilisation while the simulation thread saturates a single core, causing irregular frame delivery and stuttering even when average FPS appears acceptable.

The third factor is the Level of Detail (LOD) system. Cities: Skylines 2 renders thousands of individual buildings, vehicles, and citizens simultaneously, each with LOD transition calculations. With the LOD Factor at its default of 1.0, the engine maintains high-detail geometry for objects at distances that produce no visible benefit. Reducing this slider is the single most effective change for Cities: Skylines 2 performance and is addressed first in the settings section below.

Best Starting Settings by GPU Tier

Cities: Skylines 2 does not have a reliable auto-detect function — the in-game detection tends to over-assign quality settings that are not sustainable past early-game city sizes. Use the table below as your starting point, then apply the targeted adjustments in the following sections on top of this baseline. If your GPU sits between two tiers, start at the lower tier and move up if performance allows after the LOD and simulation settings are applied.

Note that “High” in Cities: Skylines 2 carries a significantly heavier performance cost than High in most other games due to HDRP’s rendering passes. Even RTX 4080-class hardware will see frame drops at Ultra settings in large late-game cities. Medium-High is a more practical ceiling for sustained 60 FPS play across all city population sizes.

Graphics Settings: What to Change and Why

LOD Factor — Start Here Before Anything Else

The Level of Detail Factor slider (in the Advanced graphics section) controls how aggressively the game transitions from high-detail to simplified geometry models as object distance from the camera increases. The default is 1.0. Reduce this to 0.75 immediately — this is the single most impactful change for Cities: Skylines 2 performance and should be the first adjustment made before touching any other setting.

At LOD 0.75, buildings and vehicles at the periphery of the city overview use simplified geometry slightly sooner as the camera moves away. During normal city management at overhead or mid-zoom distances, the visual difference is minimal to invisible. The performance benefit is substantial: players on mid-range CPUs with large cities consistently report 15–25% reductions in stuttering frequency from this single change alone. If stuttering persists in cities above 100,000 population after applying all other settings, reduce LOD Factor further to 0.5. Street-level and photo mode views will show slightly simplified building models at 0.5, but overhead gameplay is unaffected.

Shadow Distance and Shadow Cascades

Shadow rendering in HDRP is expensive. Cities: Skylines 2 uses cascaded shadow maps that render shadow detail at progressively lower resolution with increasing distance from the camera. Setting Shadow Distance to Medium from High or Ultra typically delivers a 10–20% GPU frame time reduction with no visible shadow quality loss at standard city-overview camera distances. Shadow Cascades should be set to Low or Medium — High cascades are meaningful only when playing in close street-level view, which is a small fraction of total playtime for most players.

Global Illumination

Global Illumination (GI) is the single most expensive setting in Cities: Skylines 2. HDRP’s GI system calculates how light bounces between surfaces — how sunlight reflects off buildings onto surrounding streets, how interior light spills through windows. The performance difference between Ultra GI and Low GI can exceed 30% GPU frame time in dense urban areas. Set Global Illumination to Low unless you are on RTX 4080-class hardware in an early-game city. Ultra GI is not practical for late-game performance on any current consumer GPU. Low GI retains broad ambient lighting quality at a fraction of the rendering cost.

Volumetric Lighting

Volumetric lighting renders atmospheric haze, fog, and light shaft effects across the city. Set this to Medium as a baseline. The visual contribution of High versus Medium volumetric lighting is subtle from overhead city management view — the atmospheric depth is preserved but the per-frame rendering cost is substantially reduced. Drop to Off if you remain below your target frame rate after applying all other adjustments in this guide.

Ambient Occlusion, Screen Space Reflections, and Bloom

Set Ambient Occlusion to Medium. Ultra Ambient Occlusion in HDRP produces high rendering cost with minimal visible improvement at city-overview zoom distances. Screen Space Reflections add real-time reflections on water and glass surfaces — set to Medium if your city has significant waterfront development, Low or Off otherwise. Bloom can remain at Low or Medium; it contributes to night-city atmosphere at low GPU cost relative to the settings above. Lens Flare and Depth of Field during gameplay: both Off.

Simulation Quality: The Hidden Performance Factor

The simulation settings in Cities: Skylines 2 are separate from graphics options but have equal or greater impact on frame consistency, particularly for stuttering. These are in the Gameplay or Simulation section of the options menu and are frequently overlooked because they are not labelled as graphics settings.

Traffic Simulation Accuracy

This setting controls how granularly the game recalculates optimal routes for vehicles across your road network. At High or Very High accuracy, every vehicle re-evaluates its path at frequent intervals as city size and road network complexity grow. This creates significant CPU load that scales directly with traffic density. Set Traffic Simulation Accuracy to Medium for cities below 100,000 population. For larger cities experiencing simulation-related stuttering, set to Low. The difference in observed traffic behaviour between Medium and High accuracy is marginal for typical road layouts — vehicles still route intelligently, just with slightly less frequent recalculation cycles.

Late-Game Performance Expectations

Cities: Skylines 2’s simulation load scales with city size in a way that graphics settings cannot fully compensate for. In cities above 150,000–200,000 population on current hardware — including high-end configurations — sustained 60 FPS becomes difficult to maintain consistently. A target of 40–50 FPS with occasional dips is a realistic expectation for very large cities even with all settings optimised. Targeting 60 FPS at under 100,000 population is achievable on mid-range hardware (RTX 3060 / Ryzen 5 5600X class) with the full set of recommendations in this guide applied.

Upscaling in Cities: Skylines 2

Cities: Skylines 2 supports DLSS (NVIDIA RTX series), FSR (any GPU), and XeSS (Intel Arc). For NVIDIA RTX 20-series and newer, DLSS Quality mode delivers the best balance of image clarity and FPS at 1440p. At 1080p, DLSS Balanced is the recommended mode — DLSS Quality at 1080p renders close to native resolution, which limits the FPS benefit. The city-overview perspective in CS2 is well-suited to upscaling because the camera distance means fine detail is rarely the limiting visual factor.

For AMD and older NVIDIA hardware, FSR 2 Quality is the recommended upscaling mode; drop to FSR 2 Balanced if you need additional FPS headroom for large cities. FSR 1 (the older spatial upscaler) produces noticeably softer results and should only be used as a final fallback. For a full breakdown of how DLSS, FSR, and XeSS compare across GPU tiers and quality modes, see our PC game settings explained guide.

Complete Recommended Settings Table

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Cities: Skylines 2 so poorly optimized?

Cities: Skylines 2 uses Unity’s HDRP renderer, which is inherently more demanding than the engines used by comparable city-builders. The simulation engine also scales CPU load with city population in a way that creates hard performance ceilings on current hardware for large cities. Most of the avoidable performance loss — the stuttering that persists even on high-end hardware at default settings — is recoverable through the LOD Factor, Global Illumination, and Traffic Simulation Accuracy adjustments covered in this guide. The remainder is a genuine hardware limitation that scales with city size and cannot be resolved through settings changes alone.

Does reducing LOD Factor make the city look worse?

At LOD 0.75, the change is nearly invisible during normal city management from overhead or mid-zoom camera distances. Buildings at the far periphery of the view use slightly simplified geometry models, which is undetectable at the distances involved. At LOD 0.5, street-level and photo mode views will show simplified building geometry more noticeably on close-up shots. For overhead city management gameplay — the majority of total playtime — the range of 0.5–0.75 produces no meaningful visual difference.

What CPU is best for Cities: Skylines 2?

Cities: Skylines 2 benefits more from fast single-core CPU performance than high core count because traffic pathfinding is largely single-threaded. A Ryzen 5 5600X, Core i5-12600K, or better is the practical minimum for consistent 60 FPS in mid-size cities up to 100,000 population. Older six-core CPUs with lower clock speeds (Ryzen 5 3600, i7-8700K) can run the game but will show simulation-related stuttering in larger cities that cannot be resolved through graphics settings alone — the bottleneck is the simulation thread, not the GPU.

Should I use DLSS or FSR in Cities: Skylines 2?

For NVIDIA RTX 20, 30, and 40-series GPUs, DLSS produces better image quality than FSR at equivalent modes because it uses a trained AI reconstruction model. Use DLSS Quality at 1440p and DLSS Balanced at 1080p. For AMD GPUs, FSR 2 Quality is the best available option and performs well in the game’s overhead city view. Avoid FSR 1 due to image softness — if your version only offers FSR 1, use TAA instead and reduce resolution scale slightly for additional FPS headroom.

Sources

1. Steam — Cities: Skylines II official store page and PC system requirements
2. PCGamingWiki — Cities: Skylines II performance and graphics settings reference
3. Tom’s Hardware — GPU performance benchmarks and tier reference

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.