Disable completely or set to "Low." Shadows are extremely taxing and often provide the single largest performance gain when turned off.
Set to Medium (or Low if your PC has less than 2GB of VRAM). High textures saturate your video memory, causing aggressive stuttering.
Are you currently running the game with ?
The Cities: Skylines modding community has built several performance-saving mods that optimize the game far better than the default engine developers did. Subscribe to these essential tools on the Steam Workshop: cities skylines settings for low end pc better
If the game still lags, force lower settings via your graphics driver.
A mandatory download. It optimizes how assets are loaded into RAM, significantly reducing load times and preventing crashes on systems with 8GB of RAM or less.
Off. (V-Sync can cause input lag and artificial FPS caps on low-end systems). Advanced Graphics Settings Disable completely or set to "Low
Go to and apply these specific changes.
If vanilla settings are not enough, the game's active modding community offers powerful performance tools. You can find these on the Steam Workshop.
Keep your game resolution at your monitor’s native setting (e.g., 1920x1080) so text, menus, and icons remain perfectly crisp and readable. Are you currently running the game with
[Graphics] UIScale = 1.0 ; lower than 1.0 reduces UI render cost TerrainQualityLevel = 0 ; lowest terrain tessellation WaterQualityLevel = 0 ; disables water reflections ShadowMapResolution = 256 ; default is 1024+ TreesDistance = 0.3 ; reduces tree LOD distance
Disabled. The lighting transitions during the night cycle require extra computing power. Keeping the game locked to daytime stabilizes your framerate.
If you are playing on a 2014 laptop with no dedicated GPU: