Is CS2 on a Minimum Spec PC Playable?

good news it's really hard to build a PC that fails to reach Counterstrike 2's minimum spec the requirements are so low that they're actually hard to buy for these days but I managed to achieve the minimum spec using this setup right here let's talk you through it I've mentioned before how vague this processor requirement of four Hardware CPU threads is and the way some of you have argued about what Hardware threads means only reinforces that if they said cause then fine I'd agree that this would mean that you need a four core processor but four threads that can be achieved by just two cores using multi-threading and hence the confusion but that's fine I'll test both configurations but for a start I'm using an Intel 12100 which is a modern fast 4 core and can be had for around $100 not a high requirement at all and a very capable processor at that I actually had to deliberately sabotage it in the Bios in order to only have four threads to play with cs 2's 85 GB of storage space requirement sounds weird because when I check it's only using up 34 GB maybe more as required during installation maybe valve predicts this is how big and Bloated CS2 will eventually become who knows I used a 120 GB SSD because I sign myself up to doing a minimum spec Challenge and so had to commit but I don't suggest you do the same while it didn't have a problem installing and playing the game on this with just 31 GB of storage space free it wasn't pleasant if you're wanting to do other things with your PC besides Counter Strike then i' suggest going for a larger SSD because it sucks to run out of storage space and ssds are as cheap as chips these days days though who knows for how long even the 8 GB Ram requirement was hard to meet this rules out ddr5 memory which seems to come in a minimum of 8 GB per stick and since we need two of these I had to go for the slower ddr4 standard instead and a motherboard to go with that all simply to get two sticks of 4 GB the hardest bit for me was finding a graphics card with just 1 GB of vram these days 4 is the lowest you'll find and this is already considered insufficient but this only makes the 1 GB vram requirement or all the more mysterious does this mean you need a card that's roughly as powerful as 1 GB cards used to be or does it mean the game literally needs 1 GB of vram but that's a card from the 1 GB era is unlikely to still be powerful enough I got the 1 GB radon 260x this tier of card was midrange when csgo first came out this isn't quite the most powerful 1 GB card you can get I believe a more powerful 1 GB 7850 exists out there somewhere but this will do so with this all set up I tested CS2 on this PC Deathmatch against was okay as opposed to being bad or good the first 10 or so seconds were full of stutters which were pretty unplayable but they stopped soon after the frame rate became somewhere between 60 and 90 which was consistent enough but it never made the game feel quite as Snappy or as responsive as a highend PC would have be I didn't know if I was shooting too early or too late with my flick shots which meant I had to spend a fraction of a second longer repositioning before clicking the button and so on it was playable but not competitively playable I've recently done a huge great video on input l and if you watch that then you'll know that there's far more to it than simply benchmarking your frame rate getting a faster monitor greatly improves The Experience even on slower PCS but so does minimizing the bottlenecking that's going on inside your PC which could be done using techniques like reflex and anti-ag but can sort of be done the ghetto way by limiting the game using a console command like FPS Max 60 this went some way towards reducing the lagginess of my experience contrary to popular belief this isn't because the frame rate is more consistent it's more that the input latency inside your PC is being reded educed by putting the speed limit at the start of the process instead of at the very end with something like vsync but even with these tricks The Experience still wasn't competitively viable I've heard that smokes are the bane of slow PC's lives and they definitely did drop FPS down to the wrong side of 60 on this setup if you want the edge against people on low spec PCS then Chuck smokes everywhere for a sizable latency Advantage I also shot at the water on overpass which I know can bring even my 4090 down to its knees but at lowest settings this had surprisingly little impact on my frim rate on my poor little minimum spec PC I didn't subject teammates to the pain of testing in a competitive match but I did boot up a 10 V10 casual server which is something of a worst case scenario anyway there were players and smokes and fires and particles everywhere the frame rate seldom dropped below 50 but the action definitely felt like it was leaving me a bit behind I briefly tested dropping the resolution down to something silly and again after the first 10 or 15 seconds of stuttering the frame rare improved and remained consistently acceptable but it's like come on mate the frame rate might be triple digits but this viewing experience is no longer acceptable I'm confusing single pixels for potential players and everything dances when I move I wouldn't play it like this so why would I recommend it to you so in short a minimum spec PC delivers a minimum spec kind of experience you still have enough power to be able to decide between a better looking resolution or a faster looking frame rate but your options will be limited and everything you choose will be a noticeable sacrifice so let's get rid of the 260x there's just no point in testing anything else with this card when I know the experience still isn't going to be good enough I'm swapping it out for the the radon 6500 XT which is a new but troubled card before I talk about why let's put it to the test in counter- strike 2 and the first time I loaded the game up with this card there were a few seconds of intense stuttering but beyond that this card performed admirably I tested low medium and even high preset and it held up under scrutiny in get shot in the back repeatedly simulator also known as dust two Deathmatch these frame rates may not be the highest numbers in the world but I didn't feel it was interfering with my ability to aim and to shoot I'm just bad at the game these days I personally think that msaa 2 times is a mistake for medium preset to use and I would rather it used cmaa instead because it should run a bit faster and should provide a more even blurriness coverage which works better with the FSR upscaling but that's just me take from this what you will I'm not even sure it's the graphics card that's holding me back at the lower presets anymore in fact I take this all as a sign that although minimum spec I've achieved quite a balanced minimum spec setup where the processor and graphics card are equally and are thus holding each other back equally depending on the set settings use remember I'm not benchmarking the processor or graphics card here I'm testing them both together in a real World gameplay scenario because that's exactly what you'll be doing whenever you play this game I also booted up casual 10 V10 because that's surely got to be a worst case scenario with smokes Molotov and insults flying about absolutely everywhere my only issue was that people kept picking Mirage and I found it very difficult to test any other kind of map with a full server of people but in the hours I tested the radon 6500 xt4 across various stressful rendering and psychological situations it held up surprisingly well you can't capture footage with it since it doesn't have a video encoder I'm using an external capture card instead I can't vouch for its performance when constrained to PCI 3 either but in my little minimum spec setup that I built and played on I probably trust this card more with CS2 than I do with cs goo but and here's the butt I'm scared of this card because it's cut down in so many ways and its performance drops off so quickly once it reaches one of those limits that even when it is working well I'm worrying about how close close to one of its limitations it might be running at will it bottleneck when I don't want it to and it isn't always about what it's rendering it sometimes feels like it's being slowed down by what it isn't rendering in CSO this card would suddenly dropped from hundreds of FPS down to below 60 when stood in certain spots of danger zone maps and on Ancient now since CS2 doesn't currently contain danger zone maps I've got to test ancient as an indication of how it may or may not perform in future CS2 maps and scenarios and for the most part it ran absolutely fine I even risked High pre set but this was the one time I encountered unreasonable slowdown with this card it was still 60 or more FPS but it definitely felt laggier and the frame rate dropped more than it should have done when I was looking towards the center of the map from around the outsides I really wanted to get to the bottom of which settings exactly were causing the Slowdown and I don't think it's just one setting but dropping the anti-aliasing and ambient occlusion down to lower settings which are the two most demanding settings in this game seem to fix it or at least to greatly improve the frame rates so there are already hints that the 6500 XT May struggle with higher settings in more demanding Maps Okay just use lower settings instead I played through a whole casual game of ancient and did rather well despite being rubbish at this game and while gaming on a 6500 XT on a 60 HZ screen and that's a more robust test than any Benchmark is so from the testing I've done I can only conclude that the 6500 XT is a viable budget card to run CS2 with for now at least the future may not be so positive but I'm still not sure I would recommend this card because recently graphics card prices have dropped a bit and others are now priced more reasonably and I suggest stretching just that little bit further to get the radon 6600 instead which will be far more capable and much more reliable just in case but I'm happy to trust the 6500 XT to power me through the rest of this video time to see what happens if I gain with Just 4 GB of RAM for Science and it seemed like it did something different to my PC every time the first time at blue screen of death the next it made my and videos monitors backlight not turn on and I got scared and I try it again but the third time it worked and I got to play CS2 with Just 4 GB of RAM what an exciting life I have it took quite some time to load the game everything felt a bit more sluggish kind of like the PC kept dozing off and it needs to be prodded to stay awake and when I finally got around to playing the game I can't say I felt lagged like this in a very long time it sometimes felt like my actions were lagging behind the action like instead of me controlling my PC control was briefly switched over to somebody else in the room who was doing their best to mimic my mouse movements the game would for a split second sometimes when I died or sometimes when I shot or when I switched to someone else's view in spectator mode but for the most part it was still surprisingly playable and the graphics preset didn't seem to do much to change the ram requirements so there you have it you can play CS2 with Just 4 GB of RAM but please don't you deserve more plus Ram is cheap as chips these days get as much of it as you can eat next I wanted to tackle the issue of processor threads to finally prove to all those people on the internet I've been arguing with that I was right all along so far in this video I've been testing four cores with four threads what about two cores four threads here are all my results I kept going down and down and when I finally attempted a one core processor with hyperthreading it simply hung on the loading screen what did surprise me though was how well two cores still ran and how little difference there was between two cores and two cores four threads so I've learned that Counter-Strike 2 can be run with a minimum spec system at about 60 FPS but the devil is in the details and we have to ask is that good enough for extremely casual play possibly on simpler Maps or on more casual game modes it might be depending on who you are and how you're used to playing games but for me this level of performance falls down a weird crack where it would be disingenuous to say it isn't playable because it's 60 to 100 FPS it's playable but then it's equally disingenuous to say that it's playable because it's a laggy feeling 60 to 100 FPS which is a deal breaker when the competitive nature of CS2 is all about its flick shot reflex-based combat with the graphics card you'll want to be above the minimum spec which isn't hard to achieve these days I chose to test the radon 6500 XT because it's the slowest current graphics card you can get apart from the 6400 ignore that one and while this is well beyond the minimum requirements for CS2 it's still in that zone where your experience with it will greatly vary depending on the settings and resolution used but this card has helped me to establish a boundary if anyone comes to me with performance issues and their graphics card is weaker than this card then I'd suggest an upgrade to them but if their graphics card is more powerful than than the 6500 XTS then there likely to be something else in the system that's causing their wo as for the processor it performed exactly as I expected which if anything complicates the minimum requirements a bit because it shows that if your processor is modern and fast enough then you can get away with having fewer than the four threats valve is claiming you're meant to have you won't want to have fer and you'll find it difficult to find a processor with fer but you can do it I do believe this requirement was left a bit vague to account for the immense difference in power between a four core processor 10 or 15 years ago versus those that are around today but this shouldn't be an issue cuz like I said every modern processor today should have at least four threads minimum apart from this one it's now mostly a matter of power because there's a big difference between a 6 wat CPU and a 200 wat one and there could be people on thin and light laptops who have more than four threads in their processor but who will still be unable to get acceptable performance because they're on a thin and light laptop that isn't intended for gaming I'm yet to encounter the infamous stuttering that so many people claim is plaguing their Counterstrike experience don't this as me thinking it doesn't exist I'm just still looking for it there are still ryzen processors to test still the onboard graphics and still stuff like Linux and Vulcan we'll get there

Channel: 3kliksphilip

Views: 310,356

Keywords: 3kliksphilip, cs2, counter strike, source 2, csgo, counter-strike

Id: vo8FIA6z9OU

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 09 2023