Cities Skylines 2's developer, Colossal Order, recently responded to rumors about in-game teeth causing performance issues for the game. A viral Reddit post suggested that the city builder game renders individual teeth for each of the populace who roam around your city, even though the player can't see them. These "invisible teeth" along with roughly 1,000 characters are apparently drawn repeatedly for the camera, as well as for shadows, but without any LODs (level of detail).

Though Cities Skylines 2 has indeed been grappling with notable performance challenges, the developer denied that the issue stemmed from the over-detailed modeling of their characters, specifically their teeth. According to Colossal Order, the characters' "lifepath" feature doesn't tie to their geometry and, hence, does not impact their performance. However, the game's characters currently lack LODs, which is acknowledged to affect some aspects of performance. The developers have promised to bring about general LODs improvements across all game assets in the near future.

Despite launching strong on Steam with over 100,000 concurrent players, the game has been plagued by performance issues, earning a 'mixed' user review rating of 53% on Valve's platform. Colossal Order, however, has assured that it has set a target of 30 frames per second for the game, even on the most powerful PCs, bringing into question the utility of higher fps for a city builder.