It goes without saying that along with many other woes of the CS2 game, performance is certainly a big factor. While yes, CS:GO is now 13 years old at the time of writing and can be run on any modern potato, CS2 has seemed to be able to generate an unprecidented number of performance issues than any other esports title.

One of which is the absurd 1% lows - sometimes less than half of your average framerate. This often results to what seems like a smooth-sailing average fps game to be a stuttery mess. There are some hardware and software tips that you can do to help with this.

Hardware

Overclock your RAM. I’m not kidding, CS2 is extremely dependent on RAM speeds and timings. Search for your RAM online (and more specifically who made your memory chip). Then follow an overclocking guide to see if you can either get faster MT/s or tighter timings. This helps a tonne. Also, dual channel is significantly better than single channel on all platforms.

Software

There are a number of tweaks, but the best ones listed in order of impact are:

1. Disable Nvidia Reflex. Disable it both in-game and disable the “low-latency” option in Nvidia control panel. This will significantly improve your 1% lows.
2. Cap your framerate using Nvidia control panel. Don’t use the in-game fps_max, and instead set it to match the refresh rate of your monitor using Nvidia control panel. This will also make your frames feel MUCH smoother.
3. Pin CS2 to non-hyperthread threads and disable core 0 altogether. A lot of Windows system stuff has to be ran on core 0, and if your frame happens to be also ran on that core - well, expect some delay, which could very well translate to a sudden dip in FPS, especially if your single core performance isn’t that great. Use any software you like to do this, you can even use task manager.
4. Disable full screen optimization and uninstall game bar. Microsoft crap just isn’t the greatest.

Then, add these to your start command:

-freq <your screen refresh rate> -fullscreen +fps_max 0 -noreflex -novid -nojoy -high +cl_forcepreload 1 -softparticlesdefaultoff -limitvsconst -threads <number of physical cores, excluding hyperthreads> 

There’s a couple of explainations. +fps_max 0 just disables the game’s frame rate capping. -noreflex disables nvidia reflex. -high sets the process priority to high, so that your system will allow more CPU cycles for your program. -threads n will make sure that CS2 knows to utilize the cores in step 3 that you allocated, and nothing else.

By now, you should have a somewhat smoother and definately more stable experience when grinding CS2. There’s also something else that almost always works - close other apps!

• Tags:
• Optimization
• Cs2
• Fps