Cities Skylines 2 is the latest game to highlight the trend of extremely poor PC ports. With releases like Fort Solis and Remnant 2 pushing the GeForce RTX 4090 to its limits earlier this year, this city-building simulator is poised to take the crown in this disappointing race.
According to various benchmarks, the game demands high-end hardware but seldom runs well. When tested with a GeForce RTX 4090 at 1440p, the game averages below 30FPS.
Why it matters: The benchmark clearly highlights a lack of polish and optimization from the developers. It also means that the most mainstream builds will be unable to handle this simulator.
Cities Skylines 2 was tested by PCgameshardware, showing disappointing results.
Admittedly, the pairing of a Ryzen 5 5600X with a GeForce RTX 4090 may have led to a bottleneck for the graphics card, but the performance results are still unjustified for this type of hardware.
Averaging 29FPS at the high preset, Nvidia’s flagship GPU is unable to deliver a playable experience by modern PC gaming standards. With such abysmal results at 1440p, 4K testing would likely result in a completely unplayable game.
More mainstream graphics cards like the Radeon RX 6700 XT delivered an average of 11FPS at these settings, while last-generation flagships like the GeForce RTX 3080 failed to deliver averages beyond 16FPS.
Once the resolution was dropped to 1080p, the GeForce RTX 4090 and Radeon RX 7900 XT were able to aim for a tolerable experience above 30FPS. Nonetheless, this level of performance is absurd for any game.
To clear doubts about a potential CPU bottleneck, benchmarks using the Core i9-13900KS and Radeon RX 7900 XTX could achieve no more than 12FPS at 4K high settings. Therefore, Cities Skylines 2 is poorly optimized for all PC builds.
Following these results, the developers claim that Cities Skylines 2 is built to be played at 30FPS. According to the developers, since the game does not require twitchy movements or fast reactions, 60FPS provides next to no benefits.
However, we believe 60FPS should be the baseline target for modern PC games. With the game performing poorly on hardware that costs thousands of dollars, we believe the city-building simulator needed several more months of optimization.
Apart from Cities Skylines 2, Alan Wake 2 is expected to be another extremely demanding game, with the developer recommending upscaling for all settings. However, the survival-horror game uses tech like path tracing and mesh shaders, justifying the requirements.
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