Cities: Skylines 2 gets its first patch with more on the way

Colossal Order has released the first of several patches to improve performance in Cities: Skylines 2 and promises that more are on the way.

Today’s patch doesn’t address all issues the developer is aware of, but more fixes are coming. The patch is currently only available on Steam, but the team is doing its best to put it on the Microsoft Store as soon as possible.

The first patch promises more consistent performance with high resolutions and includes tweaks to global illumination and depth of field, you can expect various optimizations and bug fixes.

Shortly, you can expect small patches and likely a large one, as the studio works to significantly improve different areas of performance. Some of the fixes include the removal of stutters generally caused by a synchronization condition in the simulation, optimize and balance GPU performances by reducing the number of vertices processed per frame and optimizing/balancing the effects that affect fillrate, and continuing to push out any CPU optimizations that the studio comes across in the process.

Colossal Order notes that balancing GPU performances does not mean reducing quality but taking fewer samples with a smarter distribution to achieve identical or similar results. The studio is also looking to expand the options for upscaling solutions and investigating the ability to provide a better quality anti-aliasing solution than what’s currently in use.

And, for those who are experiencing low FPS, until the issue is addressed, the developers recommend you do the following: reduce screen resolution to 1080p, disable Depth of Field and Volumetrics, reduce Global Illumination, and you can check out this guide for more tips.

With the upcoming patches, Colossal Order expects things to largely improve with default settings, but note that the performance target is for the game to run at a steady 30FPS minimum, as there is “no real benefit” in a city builder to aim for higher FPS; however, it “does not hurt” to get 60FPS as it can “contribute to better visuals in relation to temporal effects.”

Cities: Skylines 2 released for PC on October 24, and will arrive on PlayStation and Xbox in spring 2024.

If you are thinking of picking it up, give our Cities: Skylines 2 review a read. Alex feels it is an “excellent sequel with an exciting foundation for a bright, addition-packed future.”