The purpose of this article is to provide a guide on the best performance settings for CounterStrike (CSGO). CounterStrike Global Offensive (CSGO) is the most popular game on Steam. As of August 2022, it has over 700,000 active players with a peak of around 1 million. The game was first released in 2012 and has been a world-wide hit since. One of the features that makes it attractive for the masses is its low system requirements. This allows most people to have a great gaming experience without stuttering issues, which is so important from a first-person shooter. That’s why when you have performance issues with CSGO it is so frustrating.
You need to first review your PC to make sure it follows the system requirements of CSGO. If you already know that it meets those expectations and you’re still having problems, there are a number of in-game settings you can change to increase the performance of CSGO.
In-Game Settings to Increase Performance of CSGO
The first place to start looking at in order to increase performance of CSGO is the in game settings. Here, we will primarily look at graphics as that has the most impact on FPS (frames per second). FPS is really what impacts performance the most and our goal for performance is to increase that number. Generally speaking, the better the graphics you have, the lower the performance. It is a tradeoff.
- Global Shadow Quality – Low
- Model / Texture Detail – Low
- Texture Streaming – Disabled
- Effect Detail – Low
- Shader Detail – Low
- Boost Player Contrast – Disabled
- Multicore Rendering – Disabled
- Multisampling Anti Aliasing (MSAA) – 4X
- Texture Filtering Mode – Bilinear
- Wait for Vertical Sync – Disabled
- Motion Blur – Disabled
- Use Uber Shaders – Disabled
Optimize Hardware to Increase Performance of CSGO
You can optimize your hardware several ways. First and foremost is overclocking. You can overclock your CPU, graphics card and memory. Doing that is beyond the scope of this article and there are several great resources out there that can guide you to overclocking including some below.
You can also optimize your graphics card control panel. To optimize your NVIDIA control panel, please read our guide here.
You can also go into GeForce Experience and change the graphics settings for CSGO specifically from “Quality” to “Performance” using the sliding scale as illustrated below:
Common Problems that Affect Performance of CSGO
CSGO requires little performance-hardware. As long as you have some sort of a dedicated graphics card you should not experience problems that affect the performance of CSGO. If you are experiencing stuttering and have a dedicated graphics card or a mobile graphics card in your laptop, you may be trying to play the game at too high of settings. You could try turning your settings down by following the guide above.
Other issues that result in poor performance could be related to your latency and connection to CSGO servers. You should try to ping the CSGO server you are connected to in order to see what latency you have. Ideally, you should be under 100ms. You can use a quick tool to see the performance on CSGO’s side by visiting CS GO Ping Test. You can also see what your latency is by visiting Ping Test check my ping – ping-test.net.