The Best CS2 Video Settings To Boost Performance
"Counter-Strike: Global Offensive" has long been one of the most popular games on Steam, so it should come as no surprise that being retired in favor of "Counter-Strike 2" would result in a massive surge in popularity. At its core, "CS2" is a highly competitive game, and players want to squeeze out the best performance they possibly can from their PC to play it.
"CS2" can run on plenty of different rigs, but even if your PC can run games at max settings in 4K resolution, you won't want to be doing that in a competitive first-person shooter. Lowering your settings as much as possible will give you more frames per second, and that's what people are looking for if they want to maintain an edge over the competition. For CS2, these are the settings you'll want to focus on.
- Display Mode: Fullscreen
- Refresh Rate: 143 HZ
- Laptop Power Savings: Disabled
- Boost Player Contrast: Enabled
- Wait for Vertical Sync: Disabled
- Current Video Values Preset: Custom
- Multisampling Anti-Aliasing Mode: None
- Global Shadow Quality: Low
- Model/Texture Detail: Low
- Texture Filtering Mode: Bilinear
- Shader Detail: Low
- Particle Detail: Low
- Ambient Occlusion: Disabled
- High Dynamic Range: Performance
- FidelityFX Super Resolution: Disabled (Highest Quality)
- NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: Enabled + Boost
Why are these the best settings?
For fast-paced games where every frame counts, you'll actually want to set your graphics settings to the lowest you can. The tradeoff for your game looking like something from the PS3 era is a much higher framerate than you'd get with everything maxed out. This ensures you'll have the smoothest experience while playing, which means you might have an advantage over somebody who hasn't optimized their setup.
Your resolution and aspect ratio do come into play as well. Typically, you'd want to keep your resolution as low as possible, but your game can start to look strange if you do that. Playing in a 1080p resolution on a 4K monitor will look noticeably worse, and it's best to stick with your native resolution when you can. "Counter-Strike 2" doesn't exactly need the best graphics for you to enjoy it, but dropping down the resolution and graphics in something like "Starfield" or "Cyberpunk 2077" would probably ruin the experience a bit as those games put a lot of effort into their visuals. Many people have played "Counter-Strike" on stretched resolutions, which means you get a wider view of the game, but your visuals take a big hit as everything gets stretched out. If you're just playing casually, there's no need for you to take things that far.