You can now download Cities: Skylines 2‘s first patch on Steam, fixing various problems with the city-building game while also addressing concerns about the title’s performance.
This first performance patch for Cities: Skylines 2 introduces a ton of significant fixes. First off, it has changed the game’s Level of Detail (LOD) to be independent of rendering, so you can get a more consistent performance. There are also depth of field optimizations and adjustments alongside global illumination tweaks, to name just a few.
However, the best update has to be fixes to the traffic bugs, which saw cars appear randomly in fields and even in the sea if they crashed into another vehicle. Cars could also crash into nothing or appear turned over randomly.
Unfortunately, many players had a difficult time with Cities: Skylines 2, thanks to a range of performance issues. While developer Colossal Order warned players to “manage expectations” before the city-building simulator’s release, this hasn’t done much to curb disappointment.
The sluggish performance that some players are experiencing comes down to hardware. Colossal Order has previously stated that “it is built for the future with modern hardware in mind”. In short, the game will run fine in a few years when you’ve upgraded your PC.
Luckily, you won’t have to wait years for fixes. None of the problems are deeply rooted in the simulation game’s foundations, so it seems likely that they can be fixed, or at least mitigated. Players are already seeing the benefit of the most recent patches, with several Steam users reporting that their GPU usage has decreased with the patch installed.
“Some may see a significant improvement while others might only see a smaller improvement. At this time, we recommend you experiment with the settings you turned down to see what kind of fps you’re seeing with this update”, Colossal Order said.
If you’re a fan of Cities: Skylines 2, then be sure to check out these other fantastic simulation games that are available to play right now.