This benchmark tests GPU performance in Cities: Skylines 2 by Colosssal Order. Cities Skylines 2 is easily the most GPU-intensive city builder we've ever seen, even adjusted for the era. Despite highly intensive simulation happening on the CPU, the GPU ultimately bears disproportionate weight right now. Playing above 1080p is difficult on most cards, with even the RTX 4090 struggling in this game. The testing looks at AMD vs. NVIDIA GPUs (we had crashing problems with Intel) for framerate performance in Cities Skylines 2 at Very Low, Low, Medium, and High settings. We also tested graphics quality and provide some graphics optimize advice for better GPU performance in Skylines 2. The graphics guide includes some comparisons at different settings, quality levels, and discussion of texture loading bugs (even on RTX 4090 levels of VRAM!). This will help you figure out the best GPUs for Cities Skylines 2 at different price and performance targets.
The graphics settings tests will look at Depth of Field, Volumetric lighting effects, Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion, clouds, anti-aliasing, and more.