Cities: Skylines 2 performance fixes will "continue throughout the lifetime of the game," but the worst will be done by mid-2024

After a bad launch, Cities: Skylines 2 has already gotten an array of performance improvements and bug fixes. The devs say that these sorts of updates will continue in perpetuity, but you should expect the most serious issues to be worked out by spring 2024.

"While we’ve progressed quite a bit on the performance and bug fixing we’re still not satisfied and will continue to improve the quality of the game based on our internal findings and your bug reports and crash logs," Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen says in a new dev diary. "To be honest, this is work that we’ll continue throughout the lifetime of the game, as I believe there’s always something we can improve upon, but the biggest remaining offenders should be sorted out during the spring."

The devs have one last big patch planned for this year, and it's due to launch this week. This update "adds the level of detail models for characters and improves the geometry layout for all assets." Level of detail models should particularly help performance, trading in lower-quality versions of NPCs when the camera is distant from street level. Given how controversial the game's individually rendered teeth were, this should be a very helpful update.

When Cities: Skylines 2 launched, players expected it to be extremely demanding on their processors, as the previous game was, but the shocker was just how punishing it was to graphics cards, and post-launch patches have primarily worked on GPU performance. 

As community manager Samantha Woods explains in a comment on the new dev diary, the studio's "focus has been on GPU-related improvements as that's been what was needed the most, but as we're working our way through those improvements, we'll start to focus on the CPU side of things." 

Woods also says the team is working on support for newer versions of FSR as well as DLSS for further performance gains, but there's no ETA on those updates just yet.

Recently, Hallikainen said that  "if you dislike the simulation" in Cities: Skylines 2, "this game just might not be for you," then immediately apologized for saying that.