Cities Skylines 2 will release in a few days and from the looks of it, it will be one of the worst-optimized PC games of 2023. According to some early benchmarks, this new city builder runs with 7-12fps on an Intel Core i9 13900KS with an AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX at 4K/High Settings.

PCGamesHardware got access to the game and shared some early benchmarks. And, as we can see, the game performs horribly on AMD’s most powerful GPU.

At 4K/High Settings, the game can drop to 7fps and usually averages at 12fps. Even with AMD FSR 1.0 at 50% resolution scale, the game cannot come close to 30fps. Let me repeat that. With AMD FSR 1.0 at 50%, so basically with an internal resolution at 1080p, Cities Skylines 2 runs at 25fps on the AMD RX 7900XTX. Ouch.

Cities Skylines 2 is using the Unity Engine and from what we know, it does not feature any Ray Tracing effects. So, I’m curious to see how PC gamers will react to this game which appears to look and perform worse than any of the recently released Unreal Engine 5 titles. Oh, and all the UE5 games use Nanite and Lumen, two features that can provide a huge visual improvement over what Unity Engine is currently capable of.

For what it’s worth, Paradox Interactive has not provided us with a review code. Given the game’s poor performance though, I’m not that surprised. Still, we’ll be sure to test and share our initial performance impressions when Cities Skylines 2 comes out.

It’s also worth noting that Colossal Order warned everyone about these PC performance issues. In a shocking statement, the team stated that while it has not achieved the benchmark it was targeting, it will go ahead and release the game. And, to be honest, I really feel sorry about the developers. This decision was made by the management and not by the ones working on it.