Massive forests look nice but cost GPU draw calls. Use trees sparingly. Use the "Surface Painter" mod to paint grass/dirt instead of planting 1,000 trees.
These effects look pretty but consume massive amounts of VRAM and processing power.
Go to Options > Gameplay > Turn off "Day/Night Cycle." When the lights turn on at night, your GPU has to render dynamic lighting. Lock it to midday forever.
After experimenting with various settings, we've compiled a list of optimized configurations to help low-end PCs run Cities: Skylines more smoothly: cities skylines settings for low end pc better
Always run the game in Fullscreen (not Windowed or Borderless Windowed). This ensures your graphics card dedicates its full resources to the game. 2. Visual Effects (Turn These Off First)
Set this to Low or Off . This setting clarifies textures viewed at sharp angles, which is less noticeable from a high birds-eye building perspective.
Go to the tab and click Change under Virtual Memory. Uncheck "Automatically manage paging file size." Massive forests look nice but cost GPU draw calls
Beyond shadows, the “Details” and “Textures” categories require ruthless pruning. “Texture Quality” should be set to “Low” or “Medium” at most; high-resolution textures consume video memory (VRAM), which integrated graphics share with system RAM. When VRAM overflows, the PC resorts to slow system memory, causing severe lag. “Level of Detail” (LOD) is another vital setting—this controls the quality of distant objects. Reducing LOD to “Low” ensures that faraway buildings and vehicles swap to extremely simple models, dramatically reducing the number of polygons the CPU must process. Furthermore, disabling “Shadows,” “Ambient Occlusion,” and “V-Sync” in the advanced options removes additional post-processing layers that offer little value on a low-end screen.
Very Short (or Disabled if shadows are off).
Vanilla settings only go so far. To truly make , you must use the Steam Workshop. Note: Using mods increases RAM usage slightly, but the FPS gains outweigh the cost. These effects look pretty but consume massive amounts
| Setting | Recommended Value | Why? | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | | Disabled (or Lowest) | Shadows are rendered on the CPU in this engine. Disabling them can double your FPS on a low-end CPU. | | Texture Quality | Low (or Medium if you have 4GB VRAM) | Low-end GPUs have tiny memory. High textures cause stuttering when you pan the camera. | | Level of Detail (LOD) | Lowest | This controls how detailed buildings are when you zoom out. On low, buildings look like cardboard boxes from far away, but your GPU won't melt. | | Shadows (Distance) | Lowest | Combine this with disabling shadows. | | Anisotropic Filtering | Off | This makes road textures look sharp at angles. Disabling it saves VRAM. | | Anti-aliasing | Off (or TAA if you must) | FXAA and SMAA look bad and cost FPS. Turn it off. Use the "Dynamic Resolution" mod later if you need it. | | Ambient Occlusion | Off | This darkens corners where objects meet. It is an FPS killer. Off. | | Volumetrics | Off | Fog and light beams. Off. | | Vsync | Off | This caps your FPS to your monitor refresh rate. If you are getting 25 FPS, Vsync tries to cap it at 30 and adds input lag. Turn it off. |
If the game still stutters, Windows is the problem.