How to Optimize CS:GO Settings

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was released back in 2012, and the number of fans of this shooter has only grown since then. Even people who are far removed from computer games know about this game from stories told by friends and acquaintances. There is no reason to deny yourself the desire to launch CS:GO and try playing a couple of matches. Newcomers may be intimidated by the huge number of settings that affect graphics and image quality, but this guide will help you figure them out.

Screen Resolution

This setting determines the width of the image and largely depends on your monitor's specifications. Recently, people have been buying screens with an aspect ratio of 16:9 – the optimal resolution for them is 1680x1050. However, fans of 4:3 monitors can still be found all over the world – they choose values of 800x600.

Launch Options

Experienced players speed up CS:GO using special commands entered in the game's shortcut properties. You only need to enter them once – these values are not reset when the game launches.

In the "Target" field in the game's shortcut properties, add a space after the quotation marks and enter the following commands:

- novid -high -threads 4 -nojoy + cl_forcepreload 1 -nod3d9ex

We recommend learning what each of these commands does:

- "-novid" disables the introductory video, saving time when launching the game;
- "-high" lets you direct all of the processor's power exclusively to CS: GO;
- "-threads 4" distributes the game's workload across all processor cores;
- "-nojoy" completely removes joystick support, allowing unnecessary files to be skipped while the game loads;
- "+ cl_forcepreload 1" allows the game's maps to load in advance;
- "-nod3d9ex" speeds up the process of minimizing CS:GO.

Graphics

The game's "Settings" category contains many options that affect CS:GO's performance. We'll cover only a few of the most important ones.

The "Global Shadow Quality" option controls the quality of shadows in the game. If visual quality is your top priority, you can leave this setting enabled, but otherwise, we recommend turning it off.

The "Shader Detail" setting controls the quality of reflections. Unfortunately, it does not always work as intended, so it should be turned off completely.

The "Multisampling Anti-Aliasing Mode" option controls the overall smoothing of objects in the game and uses the most computer resources. To effectively speed up CS:GO, you should disable it.

The additional "FXAA Anti-Aliasing" option also helps smooth the edges and contours of objects, but it slows the game down considerably. Disabling it will not make the graphics look very bad, while CS:GO's performance will noticeably improve.

That concludes our guide to configuring the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive shooter, which will make the game run much faster. We hope you enjoy playing and win as much as possible!