CSGO (Counter Strike Global Offensive) Guide: How to increase or get better FPS

CSGO has changed drastically and with all of these drastic changes, the updates have affected the game’s performance as well throughout the years. Having high FPS is an essential feat for all the players who compete within these lobbies. Hence, it is important to know all the methods to increase your FPS in CSGO.

Impact On FPS

Valve, recently changed the whole UI of the game and switched it to the new Panorama style, and all of these extensive updates have affected the FPS performance pretty hard. When I say that these updates have affected the FPS of CSGO, I really mean it. As a CSGO veteran, I’ve played CSGO almost every day since now and then and have noticed personally that these updates indeed affected the FPS over time. And in order to fix that there are numerous ways to experiment, test and try on. In this guide, we’re going to point out all of the major fixes that help in increasing or getting better FPS in CSGO.

Prerequisites

Before we go into the details of FPS internal fixes, the main aspect which puts the major difference on FPS is your PC hardware. Currently, If you want to run CSGO perfectly on your PC you must have a mid-tier gaming PC. CSGO is a very hardware-demanding game now, as of 2018.

Believe it or not, CSGO requires a lot of CPU horsepower to push the adequate amount of FPS a competitive player needs. Don’t believe the official hardware requirements of CSGO. If you’re getting below 150FPS in-game there’s no point in playing it. CSGO is a competitive game and it requires a certain amount of FPS to play competitively. 60FPS just won’t cut it.

For instance, you’re in a competitive match and you are running CSGO at almost 60FPS locked via V-sync and your opponent is running the game at 300FPS capped, ignore the screen tear and just think about the advantage your opponent has against you. Yes, let that sink in. So, below are the minimum and recommended hardware requirements for the game.

Most Professional players play the game at lower resolutions and at lower resolutions, CSGO uses the CPU intensively. Even on 1080p or 2k, the game won’t let your CPU rest. So the below hardware requirements are going to focus on the CPU the most.

Minimum Requirements

This combination of Hardware can yield above 150 FPS, currently in CSGO’s all maps.

• CPU: Intel i5 3rd Gen 3570 or equivalent latest series.
• RAM: 4GB
• GPU: Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 (Non-Ti) or AMD Radeon RX- 550. (There are a lot of equivalent GPUs of these two. Check out Tomshardware GPU-hierarchy for more equivalent GPU to these models).
• Disk Space: Around 15-20GB roughly.

Recommended Requirements

This combination of Hardware can yield a stable 250+ FPS. 250+ FPS is the sweet spot and this is all you need if you want to play competitively.

• CPU: Intel i7 7700k or equivalent latest series (8700k).
• RAM: 8GB
• GPU: Nvidia Geforce 1050TI or AMD Radeon RX- 560.
• Disk Space: Same as above.

With the hardware confusion being cleared. Let’s move on to the actual internal FPS fixes and commands that’ll help you keep your FPS stable and better.

These tips will surely cause no harm to your PC and help optimize performance in the game as well as double the average FPS

Install Windows

Cut yourself some slack and start fresh. There are a lot of extra background processes that crawl over you over time that cause severe FPS drops If you plan to examine and delete them one by one you aren’t going to solve your problem in days or maybe months.

So just go ahead, back up your data or a different partition and Format the partition on which your windows has been Installed and download a fresh and updated copy of the latest Windows 10, also keep in mind you’d have to activate your windows again, So research before installing a new copy of OS if you don’t know what you’re doing. (I recommend windows 10 because it is the latest and the most secure version of Windows. No one wants their computer to be vulnerable just for a game, So don’t install Windows 7)

Install The Latest Drivers

If you don’t know what driver you need to install, I personally use a tiny software called 3dpchip to determine what kind of drivers need to be updated and installed.

But for your GPU, don’t rely on any software and download the drivers directly from the official site:

Nvidia: GPU Drivers
AMD: GPU Drivers

If you don’t know the exact model of your GPU, go ahead and download the auto-detect program, that’ll do the job for you.  It is available for both Nvidia and AMD.

Launch Options

The launch options can be set through Steam and accessed by right-clicking a game title in steam and opening the launch options tab.

Basically, launch options are used by advanced users. There are numerous and unlimited launch options available for CSGO and most competitive gamers actually use a lot of launch options to increase FPS.

But, personally, after testing a lot of launch options with different combinations, I think most of them don’t do the job. Except for one launch option which is called “mat_queue_mode”.

mat_queue_mode

Mat queue mode can be set by CSGO’s console and launch options both, to try and experiment the FPS impact of different mat queue modes, go ahead and navigate to CSGO’s workshop and download ‘FPS Benchmark by ulletical‘ and test different mat queue modes. Primarily this option decides the threading model the material uses. Basically, if you set the value to -1, it will use the default value for your system, a value of 0 is going to use the synchronous single thread of your CPU, 1 will use queued single threaded mode, and the value of 2 uses multi-threaded mode. (In our case, since we’ve recommended quad-core CPU’s above, the best setting for in this case is to use the “2” value of Mat Queue Mode.

We’ve demonstrated the difference between different Mat queue modes in the video below:

Verify Cores

This is somewhat easy, type ‘About’ in windows search bar and navigate to system info from top-right of the About PC page. Click on Device Manager and expand the ‘processors’ tab. Check and verify how many processors this tab is showing. In my case, there are eight processors (cores) because I have a Quad Core Xeon with Hyper-Threading enabled that’s why there are eight processors in my case. In most cases, you’ll find four if your processor isn’t hyper-threaded. If you feel like your cores are less then go ahead and type ‘Msconfig’ in windows search bar. Go to Boot, click on Advanced options and choose a maximum number of processors.

Disable Unnecessary Startup programs

Open task manager by right-clicking the windows bar and navigate to startup programs and disable any unwanted programs that you think aren’t important to start with windows.

If you still have FPS drops, and issues try monitoring your hardware’s thermal temperatures, you might have a faulty GPU, or your CPU might be overheating due to dust built in over time it might not be getting the adequate airflow.

As of now, These are the determined and practical means to get better FPS in CSGO rather than messing it up more. If you have your own proven methods, you are welcome to share them with us by commenting below.

Good Luck!