Best CS2 Settings 2026: A Pro Guide for Max FPS (AU)

Essential Video Settings for High Refresh Rates

Finding the optimal Counter-Strike 2 settings in 2026 is a crucial step for any serious Australian player. The right configuration is a delicate balance between maximising your frames per second (FPS), ensuring crystal-clear enemy visibility, and minimising system latency for the most responsive gameplay. This guide provides a complete, technical breakdown of every essential setting, from your video and audio configuration to advanced control panel optimisations, helping you gain a competitive edge whether you’re playing a casual match or climbing the Premier ladder.

Your primary video settings are the foundation of your CS2 performance. Getting these right ensures your hardware is fully utilised for the smoothest and most responsive experience possible.

• Aspect Ratio & Resolution: The long-standing debate in CS is between native 16:9 (e.g., 1920×1080) and 4:3 stretched (e.g., 1280×960). While 16:9 provides a wider field of view, many professional players prefer 4:3 stretched because it makes enemy models appear wider and easier to hit. This comes at the cost of lower visual fidelity and faster perceived horizontal movement. We recommend starting with your monitor’s native resolution and experimenting with 4:3 to see what you prefer.
• Refresh Rate: This is non-negotiable. Always set your refresh rate to the maximum value your monitor supports (e.g., 144Hz, 240Hz, 360Hz). A higher refresh rate means more frames are displayed per second, resulting in significantly smoother visuals and reduced motion blur, which is critical for tracking fast-moving targets.
• Display Mode: You must use “Fullscreen” mode exclusively. “Windowed” or “Fullscreen Windowed” modes introduce significant input lag because your PC’s resources are still rendering the desktop in the background. Fullscreen gives CS2 exclusive control over the display, minimising latency between your mouse movement and the action on screen.

Advanced Graphics Settings: Balancing Performance and Visibility

Here, we tune the finer details to strike the perfect balance between raw FPS and the ability to clearly spot opponents. For competitive play, performance and visibility almost always trump graphical beauty.

• Boost Player Contrast: Recommendation: Enabled. This is one of the most important settings for visibility. It uses post-processing to make player models ‘pop’ from the background, making them easier to spot at long distances or in cluttered environments.
• Multisampling Anti-Aliasing (MSAA): Recommendation: None or CMAA2. MSAA smooths jagged edges on models, but it comes at a significant FPS cost. 4x MSAA looks crisp, but for pure performance, disabling it or using the less resource-intensive CMAA2 is the best choice for maximising your frame rate.
• Global Shadow Quality: Recommendation: High or Medium. This is a critical competitive setting. High-quality shadows allow you to see an enemy’s shadow cast around a corner before the player model is visible, giving you vital information. Never set this to Low, as you will lose this advantage.
• Model / Texture Detail: Recommendation: Low or Medium. High settings make skins and environmental textures look sharper, but this provides zero competitive advantage and eats into your FPS. Low or Medium is sufficient for clear gameplay without unnecessary performance loss.
• Shader Detail: Recommendation: Low. Setting this to Low provides a noticeable FPS boost. While some players claim High can make Molotov and incendiary smoke slightly more transparent, the performance trade-off is generally not worth it for most players.
• Particle Detail: Recommendation: Low. This affects the visual complexity of explosions, smoke, and muzzle flash. Setting it to Low is essential for maintaining stable FPS during heavy utility usage, such as when multiple grenades detonate on a bombsite.
• Ambient Occlusion & HDR: Recommendation: Disable Ambient Occlusion, HDR to Quality/Performance. Ambient Occlusion adds contact shadows for realism but hurts visibility and performance; disable it. Set High Dynamic Range (HDR) to ‘Quality’ for better colour depth if your PC is powerful, or ‘Performance’ if you need the frames.
• FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR): Recommendation: Disable unless necessary. FSR is designed for players on low-end PCs struggling to achieve a playable frame rate. If you need a boost, set it to ‘Quality’ or ‘Balanced’. Otherwise, keep it disabled to avoid the slight blurriness and potential input lag it can introduce.
• NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: Recommendation: Enabled + Boost. If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, this setting is mandatory. It synchronises your CPU and GPU to reduce total system latency, making the game feel significantly more responsive. The ‘Boost’ setting keeps GPU clocks high to further minimise lag in CPU-bound scenarios.

Optimised Audio Settings for Competitive Advantage

Visuals are only half the battle. Your audio configuration is just as important for gathering information and pinpointing enemy locations.

Best Launch Options and Console Commands for Performance

You can further streamline your game’s performance by using launch options in Steam and a few key console commands.

-novid -high -freq 240

NVIDIA & AMD Control Panel Optimisations

Don’t stop at the in-game settings. Optimising your graphics card’s control panel settings ensures every last drop of performance is squeezed out for CS2.

Quick Presets: Settings for Specific Playstyles

Need to get up and running quickly? Here are two optimised checklists for common setups.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What are the best CS2 settings according to Reddit users?

The consensus on communities like r/GlobalOffensive strongly favours performance over everything else. Most threads recommend a 4:3 stretched resolution (commonly 1280×960), with nearly all graphical settings turned to their lowest values, except for Global Shadows (High). The primary goal for this community is to achieve the highest, most stable framerate possible, often well above 300 FPS, to ensure maximum responsiveness.

How do I show FPS in CS2?

The easiest way is to enable the developer console in the game’s settings, and then press the tilde (~) key to open it. Type the command cl_showfps 1 and press Enter. A simple FPS counter will appear in the top-left of your screen. Alternatively, you can enable the FPS counter through the Steam Overlay by going to Steam > Settings > In-Game > In-game FPS counter.

Is 4:3 stretched better for CS2?

It’s a trade-off and comes down to personal preference. The main advantage of 4:3 stretched is that it makes player models appear wider on your screen, making them theoretically easier to hit. However, this comes with two major disadvantages: it reduces your horizontal field of view (FOV), meaning you see less at the edges of your screen, and it makes enemies appear to move faster horizontally, which can make tracking more difficult.

How do I fix input lag in CS2?

To minimise input lag, you must first ensure V-Sync is turned OFF, both in-game and in your NVIDIA/AMD control panel. Second, make sure your Display Mode is set to ‘Fullscreen’. Finally, for NVIDIA users, set NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency to ‘Enabled + Boost’. These three settings are the most critical for reducing system latency.

Do pro players use High or Low settings?

The overwhelming majority of professional CS2 players use Low video settings for almost everything. Their primary concerns are maximising FPS to get the smoothest possible mouse feel on their high-refresh-rate monitors and reducing visual clutter. Things like detailed textures, complex shaders, and fancy particle effects only serve as distractions. The only common exception is setting Global Shadows to High, as this provides a direct competitive advantage. Beyond game settings, pros also maintain a secure setup, as factors related to online privacy in gaming can be just as crucial at the highest levels of play.