Today, we’ll be testing the most popular game on Steam. Counter-Strike 2 or CS2 is the successor to the widely popular CS: GO, featuring upgraded visuals and enhanced performance on the Source 2 game engine. Although the game isn’t known for being as punishing on modern PCs, it can get pretty taxing on the highest settings. Moreover, achieving 144 FPS or higher can be a challenge even on custom DIY builds. Ergo, here’s our CS2 optimization guide for midrange and high-end PCs.
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.
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 coming in at 85 GB, but this is mainly for temporary game data like shaders. The game itself weighs a bit over 40 GB.
Contents & Testing Methodology
The “Very High” graphics preset was chosen as the reference point at 4K.
Benchmarks at a glance:
Resolution and upscaling.
Graphics presets.
Anti-aliasing & texture filtering.
Global & Dynamic Shadows.
Model/Texture Detail.
Ambient Occlusion & Shader Quality.
Particle Detail & HDR.
VRAM usage.
CPU bottlenecks.
Optimized graphics settings for CS2.
Hardware setup used:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
Cooler: Lian Li Galahad 360 AIO.
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
Motherboard: MSI MPG B650 Edge WiFi.
Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Resolution & Upscaling Performance
Counter-Strike 2 scales fairly well across resolutions, but runs into a CPU bottleneck at 1080p. Using the highest quality graphics settings, we recorded average framerates of 252 FPS, 238 FPS, and 180 FPS at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.
Similar framerates were observed with FSR upscaling. From 180 FPS at native 4K, the average rose to 200 FPS, 215 FPS, and 241 FPS using the “Ultra Quality,” “Quality,” and “Balanced” presets, respectively.
CS2 features a relatively primitive spatial upscaling technology in the form of FSR 1.
Counter-Strike 2 (CS2): Graphics Quality Presets
Counter-Strike 2 features four graphics presets, namely “Low,” “Medium,” “High,” and “Very High.” The “Very High” preset sets all the settings to the highest and disables upscaling. Anti-aliasing is set to MSAA 8x and particles are rendered with the highest level of detail. The “Low” preset enables upscaling, disabling MSAA, and dynamic shadows/ambient occlusion.
CS2 Graphics Presets
CS2 is optimized for a wide range of hardware, averaging 295 FPS and 179 FPS using the “Low” and “Very High” graphics presets, respectively. The lows didn’t vary as much, increasing from 95.6 FPS to 125.6 FPS upon switching from the highest to the lowest graphics preset.
Anti-aliasing & Texture Filtering
Counter-Strike 2 is mostly limited to multi-sampling anti-aliasing and a less popular variant of MLAA known as conservative metaphorical anti-aliasing or CMAA2. MSAA is as performance-intensive as ever, but since we’re CPU-limited, it’s largely masked at lower values like 2x and 4x. Despite this, the performance dropped by 10% from 2x to 4x, and ~20% compared to “Disabled.”
Interestingly, CMAA2 is slower than MSAA 2x, producing worse lows than MSAA 4x, limiting its use to mid-to-high-end GPUs instead of iGPUs as we originally suspected.
Multi-sampling anti-aliasing is an optimization of supersampling where instead of the color and depth samples, only the latter are rendered at a higher resolution. These include coverage and occlusion tests which render the polygons/objects visible from the viewport, filtering out the (hidden) rest. Unlike supersampling, pixel shading and other lighting-related calculations are only performed once per pixel, greatly reducing the performance penalty.
No AASSAA 4xMSAA 4x
Then there’s postprocessing anti-aliasing, most notably FXAA and SMAA. These are performed in the final stages of the rendering pipeline alongside geometric edges using contrast or luma differences. Both are based on MLAA which breaks down edges into “L-shapes,” and blends the color of the pixels included in the “L-shapes.”
Conservative Morphological Anti-aliasing or CMAA is another evolution of MLAA that focuses on retaining texture sharpness while greatly reducing the aliasing at a similar performance cost. Unfortunately, the real-world performance impact of CMAA tends to be much higher than FXAA and SMAA.
MLAA
Texture filtering makes the textures sharper and clearer by continuously sampling the mipmaps. The objects in the distance look blurry with “Bilinear” or “Trilinear” filtering, but anything above 2x “Anisotropic” works well. The performance impact is negligible.
CS2 Texture Filtering
Global & Dynamic Shadows
Counter-Strike 2 features two kinds of shadows: Global shadows that cover static objects using shadow maps, and dynamic shadows used to render player shadows and particle (smoke) shadows in real-time. Global shadows minimally affect performance, and don’t affect the gameplay in a meaningful way.
Performance in the absence of onscreen smoke grenadesCS2: Dynamic Shadows
Dynamic shadows can give you a slight advantage, hinting at player positions by rendering their shadows in real-time. It certainly won’t turn an amateur into a professional, but hey, every bit counts. Although the averages don’t change much, dynamic shadows substantially impact performance in the presence of smoke grenades.
Performance with multiple on-screen smoke grenadesCS2 Dynamic Shadows
Texture/Model Detail (LOD)
This setting is the equivalent of geometric complexity or LOD in CS2. It sets the number of objects to be rendered onscreen, including bushes, grass, pebbles, and other floor rubble. It can drastically reduce framerates at the highest preset, and is best left at “Low.”
CS2 Model Detail
Ambient Occlusion & Shader Quality
Like shadows, CS2 handles ambient occlusion separately for players and environment geometry. The ambient occlusion setting only adjusts the quality of the secondary player shadows and particle (smoke) shadows. This can greatly affect your framerates when you’ve got close to a dozen people running around onscreen. We recommend “Medium” as it retains most shadows without tanking performance by much.
Performance with multiple on-screen smoke grenadesCS2: Ambient Occlusion
Shader quality controls multiple visual effects, including reflections, global illumination (or some form of AO), and other environmental shaders. They don’t enhance your competitive CS2 experience and have a mild performance impact.
Performance in the absence of onscreen smoke grenadesCS2 Shader Quality
Particle Detail & High Dynamic Range (HDR)
Particle detail adjusts the quality of particle effects, most notably smoke. Lowering the quality reduces the smoke density, improving visibility and performance. At higher quality settings, the particles reach higher elevations before being culled from the screen. It’s best to leave this at the lowest value.
CS2 Particle Detail
Counter-Strike 2 features an HDR (High Dynamic Range) shader which shouldn’t be confused with traditional HDR. It increases the brightness of the sun and other light sources at a considerable performance loss. Best left at “Performance.”
CS2 HDR
Counter-Strike 2 VRAM Usage
CS2 greatly varies its VRAM usage depending on the chosen settings and resolution. We observed a peak graphics memory consumption of 10 GB at 4K “Very High” which dropped to 8.9 GB at “High,” 7.3 GB at “Medium,” and 6 GB at “Low.”
Switching the resolution to 1440p reduces the VRAM usage to 7.3 GB, while 1080p uses up to 6.25 GB using the “Very High” graphics preset.
Counter-Strike 2 CPU Bottlenecks
CS2, like most competitive shooters, is CPU bottlenecked on mid and high-end PCs. We observed a GPU-Busy deviation of 49% at 1080p “Very High,” indicating that the GPU was idle for nearly 50% of the frame render time. It reduced to 33% at the same settings at 1440p, and just 8% at 4K. Reducing the graphics settings (at 4K) makes the game CPU-bound.
1080p Very High1440p Very High4K Very High
Most modern CPUs should be able to hit 200 FPS, but past that, you’ll be CPU bottlenecked, with only the fastest chips managing over 300 FPS.
Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Find me at HardwareTimes and PC Opset. Contact: areejs12@hardwaretimes.com.
