Counter-Strike 2/CS2 Optimized Settings for Low-end PC: RTX 3060, RTX 4060 & 4060 Laptop GPU

Counter-Strike 2 remains the most-played game on Steam. With a daily concurrent player count of 1.4 million, it’s an eSports essential. We covered the game in one of our in-depth optimization guides, testing each setting at every option to determine the optimized graphics settings. Suffice it to say, CS2 is highly optimized and scales well across all hardware, Windows or Linux. In this post, we explore its performance on 60-class GPUs and strike a balance between quality and performance.

Counter-Strike 2 (CS2): PC System Requirements

Like its predecessor CS: GO, CS2 has penalty minimum requirements. All you need is a quad-core CPU, 8 GB of main memory, and 1 GB of graphics memory with support for DX11 and SM5.0. The storage requirement is a little steep at 85 GB, but this is mainly for temporary game data like shaders. The game itself weighs a bit over 40 GB.

Our Test Setup

Windows/System Settings to Optimize

• Enable Resizable BAR.
• Turn on Game Mode.
• Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
• Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
• Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
• Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
• Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
• Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.

Counter-Strike 2 (CS2): Low-end Benchmarks

Counter-Strike 2 is easily playable at the “Very High” quality settings and CMAA2 at 1080p. We recorded an average of 136 FPS (lows of 60 FPS) on the RTX 3060 in a local match with plenty of smoke grenades. Enabling FSR “Ultra Quality” upscaling pushes the average to 178.5 FPS and the lows to 72 FPS.

The GeForce RTX 4060 produces an average of 190 FPS with lows of 88.6 FPS using our optimized graphics settings at 1080p (without upscaling). Increasing the resolution to 1440p reduces the framerates to 184.5 FPS (on average), with lows of 86 FPS, using the FSR “Ultra Quality” preset.

The RTX 3060 nets an average of 168 FPS, with lows of 74 FPS using our optimized settings, including FSR “Ultra Quality” upscaling. QHD/1440p requires FSR for respectable framerates on the last-gen 30-class GPU.

VRAM Usage and CPU Bottlenecks

Counter-Strike 2 uses 7 to 8 GB of graphics memory at 1080p and 1440p using a mix of medium-high settings with FSR “Ultra Quality” enabled. On the CPU side, we observed a GPU-Busy deviation of 15-20% on the RTX 3060 and 24-28% on the RTX 4060. Ergo, you’ll be fairly CPU-bound.

Optimized Graphics Settings for CS2: Low-end PC