Best CS2 settings for FPS and input lag (2026)

Counter-Strike 2 is the game with the longest tail of folklore: ten years of CS:GO configs, launch options and console commands, most of which do nothing in the Source 2 version of the game, and a few of which can get you in trouble.

This guide checks every setting against the current build. The menu names and console commands come from the game’s own files as of 4 October 2026, and where the only measurement is one person’s test, we say so.

The short version

Fullscreen, Reflex on, the heavy sliders low, Boost Player Contrast on, and no launch options from 2015.

Display Mode: Fullscreen. NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency (on AMD, AMD Anti-Lag 2.0): Enabled. V-Sync: Disabled, unless you use the G-Sync setup below. Particle Detail and Global Shadow Quality: Low. Boost Player Contrast: Enabled. Dynamic Shadows: All. FidelityFX Super Resolution: Disabled.

Stay on DirectX 11 unless you have a reason to test Vulkan, and skip almost every launch option you have seen in a video: most of them do nothing in CS2, and anything that hooks into the game risks VAC.

What changed in 2025 and 2026

Small performance fixes, one locked slider, and a menu that has not moved since mid 2024.

The settings menu has kept the same shape since June 2024, when Valve added the Frame Pacing section with V-Sync, Reflex and the frame rate sliders. What older guides call "Wait for Vertical Sync" is now simply V-Sync, and the frame cap is Maximum FPS In Game.

Since then Valve has made a run of quiet performance fixes: a CPU-bound optimisation in January 2025, better rendering on most maps in August 2025, Vulkan memory defragmentation in September 2025, a fix for slow Windows 10 PCs with recent Intel processors in February 2026, and a cheaper scoreboard in July 2026. The August 2025 update also locked the frame cap while you are connected to a server, so set it before you join.

The Rush Hour update of 22 September 2026 brought a new mode and a crosshair tab, and no changes to video settings. If you read that a hotfix after it changed shader compilation, that is not in Valve’s notes.

Every video setting, and what it costs

Names exactly as in the current menu. Costs from one published test at about 980 FPS.

CS2 video settings
Setting	Set it to	Why	What it costs
Display Mode	Fullscreen	Valve calls it fullscreen exclusive; it skips the Windows compositor.	Slower Alt+Tab. Measured +0.9% over borderless.
Refresh Rate	Your monitor’s maximum	Valve recommends the highest. In windowed modes it comes from Windows display settings, so check there.	Nothing.
Resolution and aspect ratio	Your choice	A lower resolution only adds frames when the graphics card is the limit.	Depends on the card.
Boost Player Contrast	Enabled	Valve: players are easier to see in low-contrast scenes.	No measurable cost.
V-Sync	Disabled, unless you use the G-Sync setup below	On its own it adds input lag.	Tearing.
NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency (AMD: AMD Anti-Lag 2.0)	Enabled, or Enabled + Boost	Lower latency, most when the graphics card is the limit. Boost is NVIDIA only.	Boost: more power, slightly fewer frames.
Maximum FPS In Game	See the next section	Locked while you are on a server since August 2025.	Depends on the setup.
Maximum FPS In Menus	120 to 200	Menus only. A lower value saves heat and power.	Nothing in a match.
Multisampling Anti-Aliasing Mode	CMAA2, or 2x MSAA with headroom	CMAA2 is a cheap edge filter. MSAA gets expensive fast.	CMAA2 -1%, 2x -4%, 4x -6%, 8x -12%.
Global Shadow Quality	Low, Medium with headroom	Shadow detail only. Which shadows exist is set by Dynamic Shadows.	Very High -10%.
Dynamic Shadows	All	Valve’s own tooltip: Sun Only can put you at a disadvantage, especially indoors.	About -0.6%.
Model / Texture Detail	Low or Medium	Texture resolution and model complexity; mainly helps weak PCs.	High -5.5%.
Texture Filtering Mode	Anisotropic 4X to 16X	Sharper surfaces at an angle, almost free.	16X about -1%.
Shader Detail	Low	Lighting and shading complexity, visuals only.	High -1.5%.
Particle Detail	Low	Particle complexity and whether particles cast shadows.	The biggest cost in the test: Very High -9.6%, and lower 1% lows.
Ambient Occlusion	Disabled	Lighting quality only.	High about -1%.
High Dynamic Range	Performance for frames, Quality for the image	Valve: Performance lowers HDR quality and uses less video memory.	Quality -1.2%.
FidelityFX Super Resolution	Disabled (Highest Quality)	A simple upscaler. It only helps when the graphics card is the limit, and competitive CS2 is mostly processor-bound.	A blurrier image when on.

The costs come from one community test with a published method (Ryzen 7 7800X3D, RX 9070 XT, three runs per setting, April 2026). At around 980 FPS a 10 per cent drop is about 0.1 ms per frame, so the same settings matter far more on a weaker graphics card. No review outlet has published a per-setting CS2 test in 2025 or 2026.

V-Sync, G-Sync, Reflex and the frame cap

Two good setups. Pick by whether you have a G-Sync or FreeSync monitor.

No sync, the lowest latency: V-Sync off, Reflex on, frame rate well above the refresh rate. Blur Busters’ tests still find this the lowest input lag, especially at five times the refresh rate or more. The price is tearing.

G-Sync, smooth and still low latency: G-Sync on in the driver, V-Sync on, Reflex on. Reflex then caps the frame rate just under the refresh rate, about 224 FPS at 240 Hz and 138 at 144 Hz. Valve’s own FAQ turns V-Sync on in the game for this; Blur Busters turns it on in the driver and off in the game. Nobody has measured which is better in CS2, so pick one. If you cap by hand, stay at least 3 FPS under the refresh rate, and use the game’s fps_max rather than the driver’s limiter. Restart the game after changing G-Sync.

FreeSync: Valve recommends FreeSync on and a cap with fps_max. The 3 FPS rule was tested on G-Sync, so on FreeSync it is a reasonable guess, not a measurement.

NVIDIA and AMD driver settings

Reflex makes the driver’s latency setting redundant. On AMD, Anti-Lag 2 lives in the game.

NVIDIA: with Reflex on in the game, the driver’s Low Latency Mode is overridden, so leave it at the default. "Prefer maximum performance" in Power management mode is optional: Reflex Boost does something similar, and nobody has measured the difference in CS2. Keep Shader Cache Size at the driver default, never disabled: it is what prevents compile stutter.

AMD: Anti-Lag 2 is built into CS2 and shows up where Reflex does, as AMD Anti-Lag 2.0. It needs a Radeon RX 5000 card or newer and Adrenalin 24.6.1 or later. In one test it cost about 4 per cent of average frames but lifted the 1% lows by 16 per cent. Turn Radeon Chill off, which also switches Anti-Lag off, and Radeon Boost off, which lowers the resolution during flicks.

Why "in the game" matters on AMD: in October 2023 the driver feature Anti-Lag+ hooked into the game’s code, and VAC banned players for it. Valve warned on 13 October, AMD pulled the feature on 17 October, and Valve began reversing the bans on 19 October. Anti-Lag 2 was built with Valve and is not affected.

Launch options: what still works

Very little, and most of the famous ones were never in CS2 at all.

Still works: -vulkan switches the renderer. In a May 2026 community test DirectX 11 was about 10 per cent faster on average, and on Vulkan the G-Sync status row disappears, so stay on DirectX 11 unless you are troubleshooting. fps_max and cl_showfps work from the console.

Placebo or harmful: -high measured +0.2 per cent, which is noise. -threads made things worse in community benchmarks. -allow_third_party_software switches off Trusted Mode’s protection and is reported to lower your Trust Factor; use it only if a tool you need requires it.

Gone or meaningless in CS2: -tickrate 128 (sub-tick replaced tick rate for movement and shooting), -novid (there is no intro video), -d3d9ex (there is no DirectX 9), net_graph, cq_netgraph, cl_forcepreload, mat_queue_mode, cl_interp and cl_updaterate. None of them is in the current build.

The Windows side

Game Mode on, Game Bar recording off, Memory Integrity costs about 2 per cent here.

Windows settings for CS2
Windows setting	Our advice	Evidence
Game Mode	On, the default	Microsoft recommends it. Measured +0.7% in CS2, within noise. Two-die Ryzen X3D processors need it to park the right cores.
Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling	Either	Microsoft: no significant change expected. CS2 results disagree, all within about 1%.
Optimizations for windowed games	On if you play Fullscreen Windowed	Applies to DirectX 11 games in a window. Does nothing in exclusive Fullscreen.
Memory Integrity	On, unless you measured a gain	CS2 measured -1.7% and -2.8% average in two 2026 tests. It is a security layer.
Power plan	High performance; Balanced on two-die Ryzen X3D	Core parking can cause frame time spikes. Two-die X3D processors need Balanced to park the right cores.
Game Bar captures	Turn off background recording	Background recording can cost performance. Keep Game Bar itself on two-die Ryzen X3D.

Tweaks that do nothing, or worse

Commands from another game, settings that do not stack, and numbers that are overstated.

The launch-option lists. -tickrate 128, -novid, cl_forcepreload, mat_queue_mode and the netgraph commands are from CS:GO or simply absent.

"Ultra Low Latency and Reflex together." Reflex overrides the driver setting.

"Vulkan is always faster." On the current build DirectX 11 was faster on average in the community test. It depends on the PC.

"Turn Boost Player Contrast off for FPS." It had no measurable cost.

"Memory Integrity costs 10 to 15 per cent." In CS2 it measured 1.7 to 2.8 per cent.

"fps_max 0 is always the lowest latency." Without Reflex, a GPU-bound game queues frames and adds latency, and with G-Sync you need a cap.

Processor affinity tricks. One test showed a gain on one machine; nobody has repeated it, and it is easy to make things worse. We leave it out.

How to check it worked

Use the game’s telemetry, measure the low frames, and ignore differences of 1 to 2 per cent.

In Settings, Game, Telemetry, set "Show frame time and FPS" to Always: it shows the worst recent frame time and the average FPS. cl_showfps 1 works from the console; net_graph does not exist in CS2.

For real numbers, use Intel PresentMon or CapFrameX on the same map and route, at least three runs per setting, one change at a time. Compare the 1% low frame rate and the frame time graph, not only the average, and never compare 1% lows between different tools. At around 900 FPS a difference of 1 or 2 per cent is noise.

What Prospira does for you

The Windows side, explained and undoable. Nothing in the game is modified.

The game menu is a five-minute job with the table above. The Windows side is where people get lost, and that is the part the Prospira Tweaking Utility does: Game Mode, windowed-game optimizations, GPU scheduling, Game Bar, mouse acceleration and the power plan, each explained before it runs, most undone in one click, with a restore point made before the first change. It does not modify the game or hook into it, which is exactly where VAC risk comes from.

On a two-die Ryzen X3D processor, keep Game Bar on. And the app can switch Memory Integrity off: in CS2 that buys about 2 per cent at the cost of a security layer, so do it only if you have measured the gain on your own PC.

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