Cities: Skylines: PC requirements and the PC you need

About Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines is a city-building game from Colossal Order. Starting with an empty patch of land, you lay out roads, zone areas for homes, shops and industry, and provide power, water, schools, transport and other services while keeping the budget balanced and your residents happy. As the population grows, traffic and other problems grow with it. It is single player, and the Steam Workshop offers a huge range of community-made buildings, maps and mods. It is rated PEGI 3. The makers recommend a GTX 580 or RX 560 and 16 GB of memory, so any of our gaming PCs runs it easily.

What Cities: Skylines needs

In plain words: to play at all it needs almost any graphics, even the graphics built into the processor, and to play it well the makers suggest basic graphics: built-in graphics on a modern processor, or an old entry-level card, with 16GB of memory.

A low-spec PC or a high-spec PC?

This is a light game: almost any of our gaming PCs will run it comfortably at high settings.

On a PC that only just meets the minimum, the game will start and play, but on low settings: simpler shadows and textures, shorter view distances and fewer frames each second, so fast moments can feel less smooth. A 1080p screen is the sensible match.

On a PC that meets or beats the recommended spec, you can turn the settings up: sharper textures, proper shadows and lighting, more detail in the distance, and a smoother picture. A stronger PC also lets you use a sharper 1440p or high-refresh screen.

Questions about Cities: Skylines on PC

How we match: we compare the graphics card and the memory in each PC with the makers' spec, because those decide most of how a game runs. For very new or demanding games, ask us and we will check the processor too. More help: graphics cards explained, how much RAM, which screen.