
Introduction
Counter-Strike is the most popular shooter game in the world, and it has been for quite some time. Despite the fact that CS:GO has been out for over ten years, the game was still reaching new player records in its final year, and just when people thought that the hype around Counter-Strike couldn’t get any bigger, Valve announced CS2.
We’ve been playing a ton of CS2’s beta, and when we managed to pick our jaws up off of the floor we got to work to figure out what the best settings and options for Counter-Strike 2 are.
Given the fact that CS2 is brand new and there isn’t an active pro scene yet, this guide will be based on our own findings. Over the course of the game’s beta and eventual release, we will add statistics on the CS2 settings that the pros are using just like we do in our other guides, so stay tuned for that.
Just one final note before we proceed: the game is in beta right now, and contrary to what most developers do (where a ‘beta test’ is basically a glorified public demo) it’s actually a beta. This means that there are bugs present in the game, and that changes can and will be made between updates that can greatly influence the performance of the game. We’ll keep this guide updated at all times so that you can be sure that this is the best resource to get your game running smoothly.
Update 15th of September 2023:
Added Texture Filtering settings
In their most recent patch, Valve has added a new graphic option (‘Texture Filtering Settings’). This has now been tested and added to the guide.
For more info, see Release Notes for 9/14/2023
Best CS2 Video Settings
CS2 Video Settings
- Color Mode: Use Computer Monitor here, it’s the best for color accuracy
- Aspect Ratio: This depends on the resolution you’re going for (and whether you want black bars to the side or you want the image to be stretched if you’re using a custom res) but if you’re not using a custom resolution, use your monitor’s native aspect ratio.
- Resolution: We recommend using your monitor’s native resolution. If you’re really lacking for frames or you want to try the pro approach by changing your res, you can always lower the resolution. The lower your resolution, the higher the framerate gains will be, generally speaking.
- Display Mode: Use fullscreen here.
- Refresh Rate: Use your monitor’s native refresh rate.
- Boost Player Contrast: This makes player models stand out a little more. We recommend enabling this.
- Wait for Vertical Sync: V-Sync can cause input lag, so disable this.
- Multisampling Anti-Aliasing Mode: This doesn’t have a tremendous effect on performance, but we recommend 2x MSAA, as turning this off will make the game look rather jagged.
- Global Shadow Quality: Set this to high. Some player shadows don’t appear on lower settings, and not seeing those shadows will put you at a tremendous disadvantage.
- Model/Texture Detail: We set this to medium because at low, things such as blood splatters can sometimes get blurry. If you’re a skins fan, you might want to set it to high or very high, since anything lower causes intricate details on certain skins (such as drawings) to become blurred right now.
- Texture Filtering Mode: This has a rather limited effect on framerates (~10 frames between the highest and lowest setting) or visuals, but Anisotropic 4x feels best to us. Some users have reported a laggy feeling when using bilinear or trilinear, so we recommend going with Anisotropic 4x.
- Shader Detail: This is merely an eye-candy setting, so we set it to low. If you’re a fan of pretty effects (such as the Doppler finishes) interacting with the light then you should set it to high though, as it’ll make the effects prettier.
- Particle Detail: Set this to low, as it’s an eye-candy setting that’ll make particles (explosions etc.) look more realistic at higher settings. Turning it down even makes it easier to see through smokes and other particles, so setting this to low can give you a minor competitive advantage.
- Ambient Occlusion: Enabling this causes quite a big performance hit, so we would suggest leaving it off. Ambient occlusion is a shading and rendering technique that’s used to calculate how different objects react to ambient lighting, so it does nothing for your competitive performance. It does impact some shadows, but those won’t influence your gameplay experience, as the player shadows are influenced by the Global Shadow Quality setting.
- High Dynamic Range: In our testing, we didn’t notice a big difference between different settings here. If you’re a competitive player we’d suggest setting this to performance, as you don’t need the increased quality that HDR offers for gameplay.
- FidelityFX Super Resolution: This basically renders the game at a lower resolution and upscales certain sections of the image, but it makes the game look extremely blurry and grainy to the point where it’s distracting to us, so we’d recommend disabling this.
- NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: NVIDIA Reflex lowers your overall system latency, so we would recommend going for Enabled + Boost here. The effectiveness of this setting depends on whether your CPU or GPU is the ‘bottleneck’ in your PC, so feel free to experiment with this a bit. Important: in the open beta, some users have also reported that disabling Reflex causes the game to feel smoother, so we’d recommend playing around with this setting a bit.

Launch Options
Make sure that your drivers are up to date when playing/testing CS2. It’s also a good idea to add ‘-high‘ to the launch options of the game, as this will launch the game in high priority mode. You can do this by right clicking the game in Steam, and then clicking ‘Properties‘ -> ‘General‘.
Best CS2 Resolution
One peculiarity in the professional Counter-Strike scene when you compare it to other pro shooter landscapes is the fact that a ton of different resolutions are being used by the pros. Some pros like to use a stretched resolution because it makes the character models appear wider, which in turn can make them seem easier to hit, for example. Other pros use lower resolutions for framerate reasons: less pixels to render means less stress on your GPU and PC, which in turn means a higher framerate count, and we all know that frames win games.
In case you were wondering: yes, using lower resolutions in CS2 boosts your framerate and no, using lower resolutions doesn’t cause any issues. If you are someone who was using a custom resolution for CS:GO, you can keep doing so in CS2. If you’re new to the game, however, we would just recommend you to go for whatever resolution your monitor is. This will give you a crisp and clean image, which can also help with identifying targets that are further away. We would only recommend you to lower your resolution if you really can’t reach your desired framerate target.
Best Refresh Rate for CS2
If you want to be even a little bit competitive, you will need a monitor that’s capable of displaying at least 144 frames per second. The advantages of using high refresh rate monitors are so tremendous that they really cannot be ignored if you want to be the best player you can be. Using a regular 60Hz setup will handicap you severely if you’re playing against players who do have a faster monitor and even if you’re not, you will not be playing to your full potential if you’re on a 60Hz monitor.
This is all clearly explained in our detailed article, but it’s very simple: the higher the refresh rate of your monitor, the smoother your game will look and feel, and the lower your input latency will be. Investing in a high refresh rate monitor is thus a must for competitive gamers.
In CS:GO, the competitive standard for a monitor’s refresh rate has moved towards 360 frames per second, and while it’s true that there are diminishing returns with higher framerate steps, we would recommend at least a 240Hz monitor if you’re serious about playing at your highest potential.
Warning
- Make sure to have a system that can produce enough frames to saturate your monitor. It makes no sense to go for a 360Hz monitor if your PC’s framerate is lower than 120FPS.
- Once you have a high refresh rate monitor, make sure you enable it in Windows. Do this by right clicking on your desktop, and then clicking ‘Display Settings’ -> ‘Advanced display settings’. Choose the correct refresh rate in that window.
Best Mouse Settings for CS2
Mouse sensitivity is the exact same in CS2 as it is in CS:GO, so you can just port your CS:GO sensitivity over to the game and be on your way without having to relearn a new sensitivity system or having to bother with sensitivity calculators.
Given the fact that CS2 will be the same game at its core (yes, there are a ton of changes made to the game, but the basic ‘aiming style’ remains the same; it hasn’t suddenly turned into a twitch shooter or anything like that) we can reasonably assume that most pros and regular players will want to stick to their CS:GO sens, so we’re basing this section on the values we see in CS:GO.
In order to compare your actual sensitivity with that of another Counter-Strike 2 player without having to account for different hardware settings, we use something that’s called eDPI. You can very easily calculate your own eDPI by multiplying your mouse’s DPI level (you can find this in the software or in your manual) with your ingame sens in CS2.
While we know that sensitivity is something personal, it’s also true that there are upper and lower limits. A ton of casual gamers have an eDPI that’s way higher than what the pros are using, and that will indisputably handicap you. Reddit user /u/JALbert had a fantastic explanation on this topic that we can’t resist sharing:
If you think about your opponent’s head hitbox as roughly a circle, that means there’s a corresponding circle of area on your mousepad you need to put the sensor on to have your crosshair on their head. The lower your sensitivity, the bigger the target area is for you to hit. It’s like making the basketball hoop bigger.
Since area for that head circle equals pi*r^2, cutting your sensitivity in half means that you’re doubling r, and in turn quadrupling the size of the target area on your mousepad. If you’re seeing that your eDPI is 5x the pros, you’re aiming for a spot 25x smaller.
Obviously going too low on sensitivity makes flicks slower and turning around more difficult, so there’s a balance. But lower sensitivity makes aim way more forgiving in terms of hitting a target.
-/u/JALbert
If you’re noticing that your eDPI is a whole lot higher than what the pros are using, you might want to consider lowering your eDPI.
Facts about eDPI:
The median eDPI of CS pros is 830, which means that they have to move their mouse ~47 centimeters in order to perform a 360 degree turn in the game.
AWPers have a higher average EDPI (1006) when compared to riflers (851).
Best DPI for CS2
DPI stands for Dots Per Inch, and it basically tells you how ‘sensitive’ your mouse is at a hardware level. The more dots per inch a mouse measures, the more the movement your mouse will report to your PC, and the further your cursor will travel.
A lot of gaming mouse manufacturers used to advertise insanely high DPI counts for their mice as if that was the key to making big plays (which also might be the reason that some of the more casual players are playing at very high sensitivities) but luckily that’s less the case these days.
There is absolutely no need to go for super high DPI counts. More does not equal better in this case. In fact, the vast majority of pros are using DPI levels of 3200 and lower, with 400, 800, and 1600 being the most commonly used DPI levels.