Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order’s latest city-building game, Cities Skylines 2, is now available, and we’ve put together the best PC settings for getting optimized performance on mid-end system specs.
Before we delve into the best settings for Cities Skylines 2 on PC, make sure you’ve updated your GPU drivers and Windows to their latest respective versions. Additionally, disable or close any unnecessary background applications in order to reduce the CPU overhead as much as possible. The settings detailed ahead should provide a more optimized balance between graphics and frame rate compared to the presets available in-game.
Cities Skylines 2 Best Settings
The settings below are there to serve as a broad starting point for further optimization based on your specific hardware specs. As a result, you may need to tweak some settings until you find a sweet spot based on your display’s refresh rate and the overall performance you seek.
GRAPHICS (ADVANCED)
- Screen Resolution: set as per the max resolution of your display or preference
- Display Mode: Fullscreen
- Vsync: Off on a VRR/G-Sync supported display, otherwise set to On
- Depth of Field mode: Disabled
- Global Graphics Quality: Custom
- Dynamic Resolution Scale Quality: Disabled
- Adaptive Dynamic Resolution Scale: Disabled
- Upsampling Filter: Catmull-Rom
- Anti-Aliasing Quality: High SMAA
- Anti-Aliasing Method: Subpixel Morphological AA
- Selection Outlines Multisamples: 8x
- Clouds Quality Setting: High
- Volumetric Clouds: Enabled
- Distance Clouds: Enabled
- Volumetric Clouds Shadows: Enabled
- Distance Clouds Shadows: Enabled
- Fog Quality Settings: Enabled
- Volumetrics Quality Settings: Disabled
- Budget: 0.7
- Resolution Depth Ratio: 0.5
- Ambient Occlusion Quality: High
- Maximum Pixel Radius: 80
- Fullscreen Effect: Enabled
- Step Count: 16
- Global Illumination Quality: High
- Fullscreen Effect: Enabled
- Ray Steps: 128
- Denoiser Radius: 0.5
- Half Resolution Denoiser: Disabled if performance headroom available, otherwise Enabled
- Use Second Denoiser Pass: Enabled if performance headroom available, otherwise Disabled
- Depth Tolerance: 0.1
- Reflections Quality: High
- Transparent Reflections: Enabled
- Maximum Ray Steps: 64
- Depth of Field Quality: Disabled
- Resolution: Full
- High Quality Filtering: Enabled
- Motion Blur: Disabled
- Shadow Quality: Medium
- Directional Shadow Resolution: 1,024
- Terrain Casts Shadows: Enabled
- Terrain Quality Settings: High
- Subdivisions: 4
- Target Patch Size: 12
- Water Quality Settings: High
- Enable Water Flow: Enabled
- Maximum Tesselation Factor: 10
- Tesselaton Fade Start Distance: 150
- Tesselation Fade Range: 1,850
- Level of Detail: Custom
- Level of Detail Distance: 25%
- Cross-Fade: Enabled
- Max Light Count: 1,024
- Geometry Cache Limit: 256 MB
- Strict Geometry Limit: Enabled
- Animation Quality: High
- Skinning Quality: Four Bones
- Texture Quality Settings: High
- Mip Bias: 0
- Filter Mode: Trilinear Filtering
