At a recent Reddit AMA, the development team for Cities: Cities: Skylines 2 answered questions from the gaming community. Among the answers was a comment by Colossal Order's chief technical officer that the game was built with the goal of 30 fps. The reason being that the developers do not see any long-term benefit in increasing to 60 fps.

Being a sequel to the immensely popular "Cities: Cities:Skylines," fans no doubt expected the game to have better graphics and the ability to build and manage more expansive cityscapes. What they probably did not expect is that the game is very demanding on PC hardware and will struggle on very expensive machines.

The folks at IGN found the CTO's specific comments, which are accurate: [Due to the nature of the game, the goal is 30 fps, and in a city builder (unlike a multiplayer shooter), the growing city is inevitably CPU-bound, so aiming for higher FPS There is no real advantage to doing so. What is more important in this type of game is to avoid stutters and have a responsive UI."

They further clarified this a bit more:

"Therefore, our simulations are also built around an assumed update rate of 30 fps. However, achieving 60 fps can contribute to better visuals in relation to time effects, so while our goal is 30 fps, we do not intend to limit or stop our optimization work just because we achieve it on the recommended hardware.

The argument is that Cities: Skyline 2 is a next-generation game. This game was made for the PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. To me, however, it does not seem right to classify PC games in this way.

I have no problem with strategy and simulation games running at 30 fps, and "Hearts of Iron 4," which I have always liked, can be slow towards the end of the game. I don't like the low performance, but I can accept it based on the fact that the engine used is as old as the game's period setting.

However, a brand new game using the latest PC hardware and technology should not routinely perform well below 30 fps. Especially on systems that cost thousands of dollars.

Nevertheless, Colossal Order is a fairly small team, and there is only so much that a handful of programmers can accomplish; during the AMA, the CTO was able to eliminate stutter caused by synchronization conditions and reduce the amount of geometry required for rendering, thereby reducing GPU He stated that the group is working on a number of improvements, including balancing performance.

Performance issues aside, Cities: hopefully with the support of publisher Paradox Interactive, developers will be able to address the situation and play on PCs that can maintain 30fps (i.e. smooth). ......