The COMPLETE CS2 Settings Guide 2023 (Resolution, Video, Audio Crosshair, FPS, and More)

CS2 has a ton of settings that are confusing and sometimes a bit contradictory so I did a bunch of research and testing to give you the complete CS2 settings guide which means video settings audio settings some things you probably didn't know keybinds and some FPS optimization so you have everything you need to have the best CS2 settings for the long term first I want to talk about our sponsor leify leify helps you track your CS performance regardless of the version except for CS 1.6 because that game sucks hopefully making you a better player with leify you can track your True Performance with their rating system that focuses on impact instead of kill to death ratio and you can compare that with your friends whenever you have a good game so you can laugh at them you can also track your bragging rights with their automatic highlights that somehow still make me look like a new check out ly for free at the link in the description starting with aspect ratio and resolution which is mostly personal preference but there's a little more to it because 85% of pros play on 4x3 and 55% of the pro scene plays is specifically on 1280x 960 stretch these settings give you a slight disadvantage because they cut off the edge of your screens generally if someone is on the side of your screen you should be dying anyways to be fair but there are situations where this can go pretty wrong it's obviously partially to do with Comfort given most Pros have played for a long time but stretch does make enemies appear larger on your screen so that's probably why it's the most common of course horizontally stretching players makes them move like freaking F1 cars so for that reason Reon I personally stick with 16x9 it's also clear that most Pros don't play in the highest resolution possible you would think this is to do with FPS and on some PCS it can help a bit however for my test it doesn't really help all that much what it does do is make the game a little bit less cluttered and that can help a lot with visibility and not getting distracted realistically if you're coming from a different game and you have a decent PC you should probably start with 1920x 1080 but there's no harm in testing out something like stretched if you think it might help now for the ADV advaned settings there's a few commands that are completely new and pretty confusing but unfortunately make a big difference I've done quite a bit of testing to hopefully give you a complete answer to which ones you should use so starting off vsync should always be off and boost player contrast seems like it should be on however it does cost a bit of FPS and isn't really visible so a lot of Pros keep it off personally I leave it on but it's not that huge of a deal keep in mind when it comes to CS2 if you have your settings too low it can actually become very hard to see people so visual Clarity is actually pretty important msaa is one of those Clarity settings and if you play close to Native you can really keep it off to save your FPS however if you play heavily downscaled cmaa2 doesn't seem to cause too much fps and can give you a bit more visual Clarity unfortunately despite being one of the most FPS intensive settings Global Shadows is not one that you only need for visual Clarity it actually has a huge impact on gameplay if you have it on low shadows will literally turn off and if you have it on medium you'll notice that Shadows start start to disappear at any reasonable range so you're going to see most Pros have it on high or very high with that being said there is currently a trick to keep this on low for the FPS while keeping Shadows on by changing some of the settings in your steam user folder and I'll show you that at the end of the video but this might not be around forever now the next two model detail and texture filtering are really just Visual and preference but if you ever noticed you headshot someone and it looks really weird that's probably because your model detail is on low and actually with two tests on two different PCS now model detail on medium gave me slightly higher FPS so it seems like a pretty easy setting to keep on medium you'll also see a lot of Pros use this as well mostly for visual Clarity for texture filtering I've noticed consistently less FPS on by linear compared to any other settings and would generally recommend the Mac setting here anti-atopic 16x while it's possible my testing wasn't absolutely perfect there's a very low chance this will do almost anything to your FPS unless your PC is from the '90s for Shader and particle detail in CSO you often had people with these on high to see through Molly slightly easier but in CS2 Molly and nade smoke has been normalized and I really can't see any difference they seem to both be best when set to low ambient occlusion confusingly can actually create Shadows on some walls that otherwise wouldn't be there and you can actually see inside of the settings menu on the wall here this also comes into effect in real games as well so you should have it at least on medium now HDR doesn't feel like it does much however a lot of people have complained about graininess in CS2 and HDR quality seems to prevent that from happening nearly as much now the last two are a little more controversial Fidelity super resolution seems to heavily depend on your PC and your resolution if you play close to Native this can have a huge impact on FPS while not really impacting visual Clarity that much so you can probably leave it on balanced or quality on the other hand if you play heavily downscaled on something like 1280 by 960 having this on low will heavily impact visibility while increasing it shouldn't hurt FPS that much at all so that's why you'll see a lot of Pros have this on disabled and I found that PC specs have a massive impact on the FPS loss for this one Nvidia reflex seems to be a little harder to get answers on but generally it shouldn't have a serious impact on performance so I tend to have it enabled enabled plus boost is worth testing but seems to be most effective on stronger systems so I keep mine on just enabled now for audio settings these are a bit overwhelming so I tested five different players in two different scenarios on as many settings as I could and here's what I found for the EQ profile it would seem like crisp is best if you want the most Clarity because it literally says as much but I've yet to find someone who didn't have a much better time locating sounds on natural instead of Chris for Left Right isolation the general consensus is that closer to 100% will allow you to hear where someone is generally a bit easier but will make it slightly harder to exactly pinpoint them in the case that you're doing something like trying to spam them through a smoke most players I've tested seem to feel best with this somewhere in the 50 to 70% range and now for perspective correction honestly it seems terrible I have no idea why this is on by default and I've seen literally lonus Tech tips mention that it ruined their ability to hear anything which was I think it was called perspective audio or something yeah I was trying to figure out like why I can't hear anyone half the time and it's like oh careful you might not hear things as as like positionally as you did before and suddenly now I can hear things so I know where people are by turning it off so far as the explanation it seems to suggest that it corrects for the fact that your monitor is physically in front of you and adjust sounds accordingly which is crazy uh keep this off definitely for the rest generally I'd keep everything off except for the 10-second warning even though the bomb beeps change I prefer to keep both and definitely mute MVP music when both teams are alive now into your game settings there are a few things that you should probably change first you should have show location and Equipment enabled so you can much more EAS easily see where your teammates are and what the odds of them team flashing you in the next 5 seconds are you also don't want to overlook your mini map settings generally you should probably Zoom this out slightly so you can see teammates on the other side of the map more easily but it can be tough to see things like the bomb inside of a smoke if you have it too zoomed out so it can be pretty useful to have a toggle bind to zoom in for those moments now Crosshair settings are entirely personal preference but you'll actually see most Pros have some level of consistency in their settings the vast majority of pros play with a small static Crosshair usually without a DOT with that being said if you're newer to the game having a dynamic Crosshair can potentially be pretty useful and so can have Crosshair follow recoil on as well these two things can give you valuable feedback on where your bullets are going and when you're accurate Dynamic Crosshair I think in theory you could leave on as long as you want however Crosshair follow recoil I had on for over a month and it's got a few specific problems first of all it follows recoil on Pistols that don't have a recoil pattern which just makes it it really hard to tap someone and I also found the exact same problem with burst shooting regardless I think these are still quite helpful for newer players now view model is preference but my God please don't use couch I use classic cuz it seems like it's the most out of the way to me but don't use couch please now sensitivity is something that I actually disagree with a lot of people on in that it's not entirely personal preference in my time I've noticed that generally people that go outside of the more common range of sensitivities usually have a lot of problems in that they suck if you look at Pro sensitivities you're going to notice the vast majority of Pros fall in a pretty specific range 75% of them are between 600 and 1,000 edpi and 90% of them are between 612,000 easily the most common actual sensitivity is actually an edpi of 800 and to me that's where you should probably start it's high enough that you can easily turn around but low enough that you can still be accurate for the micro adjustments that you need in CS this isn't to say that you can't go higher or lower if you want there are plenty of players that aren't directly in this range and some of them are some of the best players in the game but if you haven't played within this range before you're probably just hurting yourself then with zoom sensitivity I've actually seen some people get obsessed with matching the sensitivity in and outside of the scope so it all feels exactly the same however I don't see any evidence that Pros are trying to do that and I don't really think it's worth the time to try zooming in will change how your aim feels deals regardless now before getting into specifics like FPS optimization and auto exec we've got to talk about keybinds most obviously don't use scroll wheel to go through your weapons because it's really inefficient and gives you the chance that you could accidentally change guns in a gunfight on top of that you don't want to be cycling through your nades either don't leave it at the default where you have to hit four several times to get to a smoke you'll see almost every pro has a specific bind for each nade personally I use four for nade five for Flash six for smoke seven for the bomb Z for decoy and X for Molotov that way when I need a piece of utility I can pull it out instantly after that I've already mentioned the radar toggle bind but you can also have a bind for teammate equipment toggle if you want a full screen Crosshair toggle is another one that could be added if you don't run out of keys and when it comes to your jump key you may or may not want to use scroll wheel to jump technically this is actually a disadvantage since you can accidentally jump and end up dying and losing games because of it but with that being said it does allow you to Bunny Hop slightly more effectively and most Pro players use this personally I actually found it very hard to coordinate skill jumps as well using that many keys with one hand instead of jumping with my mouse another couple of binds that you initially aren't given are jump throw binds in theory in CS2 you should be able to get consistent jump throws without having a bind however it can be useful to have a bind for convenience and if you ever need a w jump throw you will definitely need a bind most Pros will have a jump throw bind as well as a w jump throw bind in order to use those you'll need an auto exec which means you need to go into your launch options there's a handful of launch options that are potentially useful to have but first the auto EXA to get one you need an auto exact notepad which means you need to find your config file in this folder and duplicate it then rename it to Auto exact and then you can open it up clear everything out and just put in these specific lines this is the one for a normal jump throw and this is the one for a w jump throw which just Taps W before jumping which is a lot less common than a standard jump throw so if you're more of a beginner player you probably only need the standard jump throw really while you're at it if you want to adjust Shadows so you can keep them on while saving FPS like I mentioned earlier you can go into your user data folder with this path just a different number for the user and change these two commands in your CS2 video file to 1 and 720 unfortunately since I started making this video valve made it so this resets every time you change your settings unless you make it read only in which case your settings reset every time you restart your game so if your computer's good enough to handle a bit of an FPS loss I would probably just put Shadows on very high two other game focused launch options you might want to use are allow third-party software so you can record using OBS in game capture instead of desktop capture which adds a ton of input lag and full screen which can sometimes fix a glitch for people that have their cursor go under their other monitor when they're turning or flicking and then we get to the FPS boost launch options we have threads and high threads seems to primarily help those using Intel processors for whatever reason CS wasn't using all of the cores okay like there's a Reddit thread on this and it explains it pretty well but basically you have Dash threads and then one number higher than your number of cores which forces your game to fix everything in theory this probably won't work for everyone and I've tested this with several AMD processors and it hasn't done anything for me Dash high is a bit more of a risky setting I've seen it increase some people's FPS by 50 to 100 but it can also cause some instability and Gain game crashes for others it looks like Dash high is more useful for people with modern processors and older ones might not be able to handle the load so really unfortunately the rich get richer for more FPS optimization I got some help from frequency Cs on Twitter who gave me these Nvidia settings that are safe and can potentially give you some benefit finally for people that are wondering how to get into stretch your black bars because when you swap to 43 it's showing the wrong thing you're likely in the wrong setting on your graphics card go into your graphics card settings and change it to full screen if you want stretched or ADD aspect ratio if you want it to be in 43 black bar unfortunately you also might have to change the scaling option from display to GPU which apparently adds a small amount of input lag but it's not enough that I've ever noticed it if you have a different solution let me know anyways thanks for watching and if you like the video give it a thumbs up and then check out this other video YouTube thinks you'll enjoy

Channel: voo CSGO

Views: 137,516

Keywords: cs2, cs2 settings, cs2 video settings, cs2 audio settings, audio settings, advanced video settings, cs2 fps, fps optimization, keybinds, launch options, autoexec, auto exec, cs2 game settings, cs2 toggle bind, cs2 -high

Id: yhoEElKV4as

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 08 2023