As cities populations grow, we are presented with more gaming options to simulate and manage them. And Cities Skylines, the open-ended city-building simulation from developer Colossal Order, is no different. However, while Cities: Skylines is designed to take full advantage of powerful PCs, the game surfaces significant issues in graphics optimisation.
Given the latest advancements in GPU technology, including real-time ray tracing and relative improvements since 2016, there’s little excuse for Cities Skylines to exhibit performance issues. In the modern landscape, where some of the best games are optimised to near-perfection, it’s still disappointing to see Cities Skylines sputter on PC.
Cities Skylines has several optimization issues, each individually minor but cumulatively terrible. Simple tasks like zooming in or out cause massive slowdown. Navigation has become a chore: GPU performance takes a sharp drop when intricate areas of the city are close together. Not to mention, user interface physics (such as dragging, dropping, and moving elements) become sluggish when too many changeable elements are present.
One explanation for Cities Skylines’ poor GPU optimisation may be that the game is built on an outdated engine—the Unity engine released in 2017 as opposed to the newer version released in 2019. This could be the root of the problem, as newer technologies and advancements that optimise GPU performance better are not integrated into the game.
It doesn’t help that Cities Skylines ships with poor default graphics settings when it comes to visuals and optimisation. Many of the graphical settings change nothing while some are locked behind paywalls. This explains why the game runs worse than it should for people who don’t know how to adjust the game’s settings.
It is difficult to ignore the deep flaws in Cities Skylines’ GPU performance. But it’s still hope, Colossal Order can shift the tide by releasing frequent updates, with optimisations, for this otherwise great open-ended city-building simulation.
