Ultimate CS2 Settings & Performance Guide

hi guys in today's video I aim to bring you the most comprehensive settings and performance gu available for CS2 we'll cover Windows settings in-game settings and other performance related settings that will help you achieve lag free and stutter-free game plan I encourage you to watch the video to its completion so that you can take advantage of every single tip but I have bookmarked out the various fixes so that you can skip around if needed stick around and let's get started before getting started with in-game settings there's some general Windows housekeeping that we're going to want to take care of to get started we'll click Start and type update into the search bar then we'll click check for updates but before clicking check for updates we're going to want to go into advanced options and every radio button related to the advanc options of Windows updates we're going to want to switch off as we don't want a Windows update to come through whilst we are having a gaming session so receive updates for other Microsoft Products off get me up to date off download updates over a meted connection off and finally notify me when a restart is required to finish updating will switch off we'll close that down and return to Windows update a little bit later next we'll click Start we'll top in settings click settings and come over to gaming we'll start with game bar which in this case we need to switch off it's an additional overlay that really doesn't help CS2 and it hinders your performance slightly we'll go one level back to gaming and come under captures everything related to captures from a Windows perspective we're going to want to turn off to record what happened off capture audio when recording a game off and capture Mouse C cursor when recording a game off then finally we'll click on game mode game mode we can leave on as it actually does help optimize your PC ever so slightly for CS2 by reducing background apps then within the same menu we'll click on graphics and we'll put CS in the search list we'll look for CS2 and we'll click on it and then finally click options inside of options we need to make sure that high performance is selected and not that Windows is deciding whether we are running high or power saving performance mode then we'll close that down click Start type CMD into the search box for command prompt right click on it and run as administrator once that pops up we're going to paste the following code into command prompt that will be in the description of the video you'll hit enter and what that will do is enable an ultimate performance power mode that we going to enable in the power settings now so we'll click Start typ in control panel click on control panel come to system come to power options and we'll have ultimate performance mode enabled finally close that down and we're going to update the machine both from a Windows perspective as well as your drivers I would recommend doing your Nvidia or AMD drivers at this point before doing your windows drivers update if you're running an Nvidia card head to this website which will be in the description and select your series of Nvidia graphics card hit search it will give you the latest game ready driver download it follow the prompts and install it if you're running an AMD card latest release is 15.7 point1 download it for the appropriate operating system Windows 10 Windows 11 64bit install it and then we'll be good to go onto the next step okay so at this point we're ready to update the machine from a Windows perspective to do that we'll click Start type update click on check for updates and at the top right click the blue button check for updates the reason why it's preferable to do the Windows update last is because it will likely take about 5 or 10 minutes and cause your machine to reboot in the process naturally we want to try and do that l once that's done your machine will reboot and we'll be ready to take on some settings in the Nvidia control panel right so next up is the Nvidia control panel settings and fortunately I only have an Nvidia card to be able to show you with but the process is largely the same for MD cards first thing you'll do is right click on the desktop click Nvidia control panel and wait for it to load up the very first thing we'll do is come over to manage 3D settings where in reality there's only two settings that we're going to want to change the first being power management mode you can if you'd like set this to prefer maximum performance at all times meaning that when the game is running the card is going to be tapping out at its full potential in my experience I found that because of heat when playing the game the Cod will fluctuate in terms of its clock frequency so it's better to set it to Adaptive in order to have a stutter-free gameplay but you can experiment with the two settings either having adaptive or prefer maximum performance I wouldn't recommend optimal power because that's trying to Bal balance out power requirements and not really giving you a good gaming experience the next is setting the preferred refresh rate to the highest available for your given monitor so you'll want to click that highest available refresh rate for your given monitor next we'll come over to change resolution and if you haven't done so already we'll set the refresh rate to the highest that your monitor can possibly output so in my case that's 144 HZ next we'll come up to adjust desktop color settings and there's only really one setting that we want to play with here and that's digital Vibrance all this does is give colors a pop especially Reds greens and blues it gives the base colors a pop in CS2 um I found that 75% is a good balance but you can go as high as 80 even 90% if you really want the colors of CS2 to pop lastly if you're playing a nonnative resolution you would come to adjust desktop size in position so for example you playing on 1024x 768 or 1280x 960 something nonnative to your refresh rate and your monitor um you would then come and set your scaling to full screen instead of on aspect ratio and what that will do is get rid of the black bars on either side of your screen and give you a full picture where the player models are a bit wider if you want a separate video on how to set up correctly uh playing on a non-native resolution then let me know down in the comments once you've done all of that you can come out of Nvidia inspector and save all of those changes okay so finally we get to talk about some in-game settings for CS2 we're going to start off with video we will ultimately touch on audio which hopefully will bring us to the same level of audio that we had in CSG go but in CS2 with the settings that I believe make the biggest difference but for now we'll start off by pressing shift and tab and then going to settings in the steam overlay once we're in settings we'll go in game and we'll enable an in-game FPS counter in the top left or the top right just so that we can monitor our progress then we'll come over to settings and the very first settings we'll touch is under the video tab now under video is the display mode whether you're going to play in full screen or full screen windowed now I've done numerous testing between the two and I can honestly say that full screen window is providing a better experience for the reason that if you're in fulls screen window you can alt tab quicker to the desktop and when dying there's an animation in CS2 that does feel like it's stuttering when you're in full screen mode I'm not sure what the reason for that is but in my testing I can honestly say say that full screen window has provided overall a better experience if you would like to play on full screen yourself that's absolutely fine too but it has provided a better experience in my experience then we'll touch on advanc video These settings you can copy paste pretty much as is we will come and fine tune these in a moment um but for the best experience I found on most Hardware you can pretty much copy paste these values one for one so we'll go through them boost player contrast it just gives a bit of an outline on players in the distance so you can leave that enabled wait for vertical SN we definitely want to disable because that introduces input latency and we don't want any input latency between our shots and the shots connecting then values that I have for multi- sampling you can leave that on four times most graphics cards anything over 4 GB graphics card these days playing CS2 um you can leave it on four time we'll come back to that setting in just a moment Global Shadow quality I would encourage you to leave it as high as possible it's not such a huge performance it and you want to be able to see Shadows especially in this game where Shadows can ultimately give away your position model texture quality to save on vram even though you might have a 10 12 24 GB card irrespective the texture quality is so high in CS2 that you can just leave it online texture filtering mode always put it up as high high as you possibly can 16 times Shader detail you can leave it on high but particle detail I would encourage you to leave that as low as you possibly can um when particles are up close things like fire um explosions Sparks from bullets hitting on fences and that sort of thing usually happens up close and in your face and that detail at greater distances is lost you don't need it it's extra CPU processing power and this is a CPU int ensive game not so much a graphically intensive game that's why you'll notice most of these settings we're actually trying to Unbound the CPU in this instance and not so much the graphics card ambient occlusion I leave it disabled it just darkers things in Corners um so if you got two corners intersecting it will make them a little bit darker because there's less light but you can leave it disabled for the sake of visibility High dynamic range I leave that at performance there's no real up side to setting it to Quality and this setting here is going to largely determine when we actually load up the map and see how we're doing in terms of performance this Fidelity effect super resolution is a means of scaling your native resolution so for example if you play at 1920 by 1080 um this if you set it to say medium or balanced this will actually run the game in a lower resolution and then upscale it to your desired resolution so you can can a huge performance gain here for very little in the way of uh quality degradation Nvidia reflex latency if you've got an Nvidia card I recommend leaving that enabled so as far as video settings go really copy these one for one and what we're going to do is we're going to head over to play we're going to come over to practice and we're going to take one of voles newly remastered Maps overpass because I find it's really good at setting a benchmark for performance we'll let that load up okay we'll pick a side now okay very first thing we're going to want to do is press the tier key to bring up the console and we'll type bot uncore kick just to get rid of all the Bots and make this a practice match then if you don't have console enabled you can go to settings game and scroll to the top it'll be the very very first option here enable console just so that you can do these commands next command we'll do is FPS Max and we'll set it to zero just so that our FPS is uncapped so you can see in the top right corner I'm getting roughly 260 frames per second with these settings now where we're going to go is to what I think the most performance impact on this map or what has the most performance impact on this map and it's this area of long just because there's so much in the way you can see I've dropped from 260 I've dropped all the way down to 214 frames per second so on your rig this is where you're going to determine where you deviate those settings that I just gave you now if you recall I mentioned under the game settings so if we hit settings game and we go back to video Advance video These are the two settings that you're going to want to play with and just to give you an idea we'll set for Del delity FX super resolution we'll set it all the way down to balanced and apply that now you'll notice some degreg in terms of quality not much to be honest but our FPS are all the way back up at 260 so just that single setting alone can net you upwards of 60 70 frames and that is honestly the one that you need to be playing with um if you still need more performance you can go straight back and and disable your multi sampling or at least put it down but just take note that that will introduce jagged lines where multisampling is trying to correct Jagged Lin so for example on edges of trees edges of buildings and that's not something that you really want and that about sums it up for video performance next we'll talk about audio okay so we finally get to talk about audio and audio in CS2 is quite funny because it's naturally quite subjective what sounds good for someone might not necessarily sound as good for someone else but my goal with audio in CS2 was to try and get it to the same level of immersion that we had in csgo and the same surround sound experience that we had now to cover this we'll need to go to the audio tab naturally in audio and play around with some of these settings here now valve have gone in built their own in-house surround sound algorithm for lack of a better word we are going to play with this in order to get the best possible sound out of CS2 in CS2 um the first thing that I change is the EQ profile I found that out of the three EQ profiles that we have on offer that natural sounds the best crisp is their supposedly to try and accentuate the highs um things like grenades bouncing off of walls and that sort of thing um but I found that it can be a little bit strenuous on The Listener so natural is kind of the better fit the next thing we're going to play with is left and right isolation think of this as on the left hand side being 5.1 surround sound and on the right hand side being complete stereo we're going to set it all the way to the right hand side 100% in effect giving us stereo spread and stereo separation the reason for this is because we don't want cs2s engine audio engine to be providing the surround sound mixing we want a stereo setup and then we're going to be doing our own surround sound with either Dolby or your own surround sound software that you may have with your head headphones um the next setting that we're going to set is perspective correction we're going to go ahead and set that to know that's also part of cs2s In-House audio solution where trying to do the surround sound mixing on their own once you have these three settings set as they are natural 100% left and right isolation and perspective correction then we can go into windows and then actually Elevate our sound ourselves the very first thing that you want going to do is right click in Windows 11 on your little sound icon tray here and click properties then scroll down all the way to more sound set and wait for this little dialogue to pop up then on your headphones you right click and select properties and go to spatial sound now if you don't have Dolby access you can enjoy for 7 days I believe it is a limited time offer where you can use the software I really do recommend buying it um if not and you don't want a full card for for Dolby then you can make use of Windows Sonic for headphones which is which is also a spatial virtual 5.1 7.1 surround sound option it is pretty good it's better in my opinion than um cs2s inbuilt engine for audio but the premier solution being Dolby Atmos so what you'll do is Select that and you're pretty much done if you don't have Dolby Atmos or if you would like to try it it's quite simple to get it hit start typ in Microsoft Store hopefully you logged in already if not then just sign in with your Microsoft credentials and wait for it to load up in the search field type in Dolby access and come to this app over here in my side it will just say open but on your side if you don't have it it will say install where once installed it will open up and it will offer you a 7-Day free trial in our case we're going to open it up and I'm quite satisfied but we'll write it later you'll come over to products just to make sure that you do have Dolby Atmos for headphones and it's ready for use and under settings the best one in my experience is game and performance mode and it's as simple as that if you've got game and performance mode set up in Dolby Atmos and you're using it as your spatial sound option and you've got those settings in CS2 um described as I put them then Dolby is doing your surround sound for you and not the inbuilt CS2 option the final and third option is for you to use your own headphones um virtualized surround sound if you've got something like a Logitech grpro and they've got their own 7.1 surround sound you can make use of that with the same settings in csgo it's going to provide a very similar experience um ultimately I would say Dolby they've been in business for very many years and they know what they're doing when it comes to surround sound that would be my preferred option and that pretty much sums it up guys if you enjoyed this video or find it helpful in some way I would employ you to leave a like comment consider subscribing really helps out grow the channel and please feel free to comment down below anything else you think I might have missed or any particular tips that you have for CS2 to try and help this game to get it running just as good as our beloved csgo did in the past thank you guys for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: Creature

Views: 1,885

Keywords: cs2 settings, cs2 fix lag, cs2 fix stutter, cs2 fix sound, best settings cs2 fps, best cs2 sound settings, cs2 micro stutters, cs2 micro stutter fix, cs2 audio muffled, cs2 audio fix, cs2 lag fix

Id: i2jL6O4-k20

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2024