Cities Skylines 2 “shadow flickering, lag, and frame drop” error: Possible fixes, reasons, and more

Cities Skylines 2's performance issues seem to be plaguing PC users all the more, as apart from crashes and launching bugs, players are experiencing frame drops, shadow flickering, and a lack of overall optimization.

While Paradox Interactive will be looking to come up with fixes for the issues in coming updates, players are stuck to looking for ways to make the title playable for themselves until then.

Fortunately, there are a few workarounds that many in the community seem to have benefitted from. Although these aren’t permanent solutions, they have helped in numerous cases.

Today’s Cities Skylines 2 guide will, therefore, go over some of the steps that you can try in order to deal with the lag, frames, and shadow issues in the game.

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How to fix shadow flickering, lag, and frame drops in Cities Skylines 2?

As mentioned, there are no permanent official solutions that you will be able to try and fix the performance issues in Cities Skylines 2, however, here are a few workarounds that you may give a shot.

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1) Set Anti-Aliasing to TAA

One of the better-known fixes for shadow flickering in Cities Skylines 2 will be to switch Anti-Aliasing to TAA.

To be able to do this, you must launch the title, head into settings, and then Graphics.

Now make your way to the Advanced tab; here, you will find the Anti-Aliasing setting that you will then need to switch into TAA.

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2) Lower the graphics settings

For excessive frame drops, lags, and stutters, you might want to reduce the graphical fidelity that you use for the game. Lowering the settings, as well as the textures, is likely to stabilize gameplay significantly, so tweak it such as to exert less stress on your system.

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3) Check system requirements

You might be lacking the necessary hardware to optimally run Cities Skylines 2. Here are the recommended and minimum settings for the game:

Minimum requirements

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 X / Intel Core i7-6700K
• RAM: 8GB
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 480 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
• Storage: 60GB available space
• OS: Windows 10

Recommended specs

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X / Intel Core i5-12600K
• RAM: 16GB
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT / Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080
• Storage: 60GB available space
• OS: Windows 10 or Windows 11

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4) Set Dynamic Resolution Scale Quality to Constant

An additional method of improving performance in the game will be to make your way to settings and then access the Dynamic Resolution Scale Quality tab.

Here, you must set the feature to Constant to get improved frames and performance stability.