Cities: Skylines II – Tips for Improving Performance (Slightly)

How to Improve Performance

• Advanced settings, change AA to TAA from SMAA. (Faster and looks better).
• Global Illumination – Disabled (if you put it on Low, you get extreme noise on all meshes, especially cars as they drive around, due to the sampling rate not being high enough, and if you make it high enough, you lose 40% of your framerate). Looks better than Low.
• Vsync – Off (some youtubers have noted a 10x increase in 1% low fps, note NOT average, but 1% lows, less stuttering).
• Dynamic Resolution – Off (or 70% if you can deal with blurriness).
• Depth of Field – Disabled
• Motion Blur – Disabled
• Fog – Enabled (along with volumetrics low, retains atmosphere)
• Volumetrics – Low
• Ambient Occlusion – Low
• Reflections – Medium
• Shadows – Medium
• Water – Medium
• Animation Quality – Medium
• Level of Detail – Custom (extra fps with lower LOD without ruining vram cache)
• 50%, Cross-fade, Max Light 8k, Geometry Cache 4GB

Everything else on High presets.

I put this together because i finally got the game “playable” (barely), while still looking nice and not absolute awful at all Low.

The biggest impact to visual quality by far is changing AA to TAA.

SMAA is an extremely outdated awful method for deferred rendering, as it does NOT prevent jaggies (as you’ve probably noticed) while taking MORE frametime to process than TAA or FXAA.

The benefit of TAA being that it doesnt blur the whole image or 2d textures / UI like FXAA does.

Why TAA isnt the default without users having to brave the “Advanced” settings is pure insanity in 2023. SMAA should not be preferred.