Counter-Strike 2 best settings: CS2 settings for max FPS & competitive advantages

❘ Published: 2024-03-14T16:17:57

Valve / Dexerto

Elevate your gaming performance with the best Counter-Strike 2 settings, designed to optimize FPS while maintaining visual appeal. Here are the perfect CS2 settings for a seamless gaming experience.

Counter-Strike 2 has emerged as the successor to CS:GO, undergoing a substantial transformation from its predecessor. The sequel introduces notable changes to gameplay, including revamped smoke mechanics, alongside enhancements to graphics and lighting.

But, due to these improvements, CS2 requires much more from your graphics card and CPU, so it’s important to max out your FPS by adjusting your settings.

So, here are the very best Counter-Strike 2 settings for maximum FPS and competitive advantages, based on our testing, and after the frequent updates Valve has rolled out.

Best CS2 settings

Video settings for Counter-Strike 2

The first tab of settings you need to adjust is Video. Here, you can change brightness, aspect ratio, and resolution.

Resolution is mostly personal preference, but we’ve got a guide on the best resolution options for CS2 here. The three most common are 16:9 (1920×1080), 16:10 (1680×1050), and 4:3 (1280×960). If you are unsure, stick with native 16:9 for now.

Main menu background scenery: Your preference
Color mode: Computer Monitor
Brightness: 100%
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Resolution: 1920×1080
Display mode: Fullscreen
Refresh rate: Maximum possible (Typically 144hz or 240hz)
Laptop power savings: Disabled

The exact aspect ratio and resolution setting you use is up to you. However, setting it to something like 16:10, 1680×1050, will improve your FPS, as the game is now rendering at a lower resolution than the default 1920×1080. Be careful if you are on a 1440p monitor too, as using this instead of 1080p will significantly impact FPS – instead, you should stick to 1080p at most.

Using a 16:10 aspect ratio will also stretch the game slightly, but not as much as 4:3. To get stretched res, make sure your graphics card scaling settings are set to ‘fullscreen’, not ‘aspect ratio’. Using stretched res will make enemies appear slightly larger (wider), but they will also move faster across the screen space.

Advanced Video Settings (Graphics)

Boost player contrast: Enabled
Wait for vertical sync: Disabled – Can cause input delay and locks FPS to refresh rate
Current video values preset: Custom
Multisampling Anti-Aliasing Mode: 4X MSAA – Lower values provide minor FPS gain, but look bad
Global Shadow Quality: High – Or Medium, but avoid low
Model / Texture Detail: Medium – Minimal FPS impact
Texture Filtering Mode: Bilinear – Minimal FPS impact
Shader Detail: High – Significant visual improvement for minimal FPS hit
Particle Detail: Low – Improves FPS
Ambient Occlusion: Medium – Can be advantageous with minimal FPS impact
High Dynamic Range: Quality – Minimal FPS impact, big visual upgrade over Performance
FidelityFX Super Resolution: Disabled (Highest Quality) – Avoid, causes smudged appearance
NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: Enabled – If you are CPU-bound, use Boost

You might think disabling FidelityFX Super Resolution would improve performance, but this setting improves your FPS by upscaling. Ultra Quality will look almost identical, with a small boost in performance. If you are struggling with FPS, you could try Quality instead, but for most players, we’d keep it Disabled.

Some players still report increased input latency when using FidelityFX Super Resolution, so for now, it is safest to disable it and use other settings to improve your FPS.

You might be wondering why High Dynamic Range is set to Quality. Initially, we recommended Performance, for extra FPS. However, changing to Quality barely impacts FPS, and Performance currently creates an odd grid-line effect on the screen in some darker areas, which can be distracting.

What about MSAA in CS2? If you are struggling for FPS, you can try changing to 2X MSAA instead of 4X. Having MSAA disabled entirely will give a further boost, but the game became very uncomfortable to look at. Additionally, 1% low frames are actually better with higher MSAA settings. 4X feels like the sweet spot.

We also recommended setting Global Shadow Quality to High or Medium, as shadows in CS2 can give away positions. If you have shadow settings at Low, you will be at a disadvantage in some areas on maps like Nuke especially.

Model / Texture detail has almost no effect on FPS in our testing, so you should be able to keep this at medium or even high, to enjoy skins looking a bit nicer. Particle detail can be set to Low, but many pro players are now setting Shader detail to High for the visual improvements, and almost no FPS loss.

In an update, Valve added a new setting: Texture Filtering Mode. Based on tests, this setting barely impacts FPS, but using Bilinear will grant a small FPS boost, for limited visual downside. If you prefer the look of higher values though, you won’t lose many FPS.

CS2 Audio settings

Master Volume: Preference
Audio Device: Default Device
EQ Profile: Crisp
L/R Isolation: 50-80%
Perspective Correction: No
Enable Voice: Press to use mic
Streamlined Push to talk: Yes

Many of these settings will depend on your setup, but assuming you are using headphones when playing CS2, these settings should be a good starting point.

Crisp EQ will make higher-frequency sounds louder, which can assist in hearing things like dropped weapons, footsteps, and gunfire.

L/R Isolation is a setting that players have been tinkering with, and there is no consensus really on what is best, but start by setting it around 50%, and give yourself time to get used to it, before changing the value. At 100%, the ‘middle’ of the audio space will be gone, pushing everything to your left and right, but this means audio in front and behind may be less clear. At 0%, all audio will be merged, which may sound more ‘natural’, but less informative.

Perspective Correction is a new feature that tries to more accurately reflect where audio is coming from, from your perspective in the game. If you’d rather make the audio more like CS:GO, you should turn this off.

When it comes to the audio sliders in CS2, there is really only one volume setting that is important for competitive play: the ten-second bomb warning.

Make sure to have this turned up to around 10-30%. However, Valve has now changed the ‘beeping’ sound of the bomb at 10 seconds too, so this music is not as necessary, if you don’t like it.

Game settings for CS2

The next batch of settings to look at are game settings. Many of these are simply personal preference, but some of them will definitely improve your experience in CS2.

Game

Max Acceptable Matchmaking Ping: 100
Max Acceptable Game Traffic Bandwidth: Unrestricted
Community Notification location: Top right
Enable Developer Console (~): Yes
Install Counter-Strike Workshop tools: No

Hud

Hud scale: 0.90
Hud color: Preference

Team

Show Team Positions in hud: Show location and equipment
Show teammate colors in competitive: Show colors
Use teammate colors on ID: No
Friends lobby default permissions: Friends need invites
Looking to play when Counter-Strike starts: Remember last state

Communication

Player pings: Display and sound
Mute enemy team: No
Mute all but friends: No
Hide Avatar Images: Preference
Clean player names: Preference

Radar / Tablet

Radar centers the player: Yes
Radar is rotating: yes
Radar Hud size: 1
Radar Map zoom: 0.60
Toggle shape with scoreboard: Yes

Crosshair

We recommend using one of the best crosshairs used by pro players, which we have in our crosshair codes guide.

Your crosshair is just a personal preference, but the majority of players prefer a ‘static’ crosshair, as it is less distracting when shooting. To get started, we recommend checking out some of the crosshairs used by pro players above.

Mouse settings

When it comes to sensitivity and DPI, it will come down to your personal preference. However, there is a generally accepted recommendation to keep your DPI fairly low in Counter-Strike, and this is no different in CS2.

Many pros will use an eDPI (effective DPI) of between 700 – 1200. Anything higher than this, and it can be more difficult to be precise and make small adjustments with your aim.

To work out your eDPI, you simply need to multiply your sensitivity by your mouse DPI. For example, an in-game sensitivity of 1 and DPI of 800 would give you an eDPI of 800. 1.3 sensitivity and 800 DPI would be an eDPI of 1040.

Item

Quick Graffiti: Yes
Delay Sniper Rifle un-scope after shot: No
Auto re-zoom sniper rifle after shot: No
Detach Silencer on M4A1-s and USP-S: Disabled
Always show inventory: Yes
Open Buy Menu with Use Key: Yes
Buy Menu Number Keys: Number Keys Buy Items
Buy Menu Donation Key: Left Control

The majority of other settings in CS2 are simply personal preferences, so play around with different crosshairs, key binds and sensitivities to see what suits you.

However, we also recommend disabling the ‘Detach silencer from M4A1-S and USP-S‘ setting. This will stop you from accidentally removing the silencer by right-clicking. This is a new setting in CS2, as players in CS:GO would get frustrated by misclicking and removing the silencer. Remember: there is no benefit to removing the silencer!

As you’re loading up CS2, check out our other Counter-Strike 2 guides: