CS2 Input Lag Guide – Best Settings for LOW LATENCY
If you want to know more about what other factors can impact latency in your games, or just more about what it is I’m testing here, check out the first video in this series on Rainbow Six Siege. I’ll link it in the cards for you. Right, let’s take a look at latency in CS2. In general, CS2 is still quite a work in progress, so Valve may change or add settings that change the results here, and as always this is performance from my system – a Ryzen 9 7940HS and RTX 4060 Laptop machine specifically, so your mileage may vary.
Settings wise, we have the usual presets, Very High, High, Medium and Low, plus NVIDIA Reflex and AMD FSR. Starting on Very High and working our way down, that comes out to a pretty dreadful 27 milliseconds on average. For context, the High preset drops 5 milliseconds off the top to bring that down to 21.9 milliseconds. That’s still pretty high, but certainly better, and let’s face it, you aren’t playing CS2 for its compelling visuals… The Medium preset offers a very significant drop, in fact it basically halves the latency down to 11.2 milliseconds. That’s a huge difference, like how do you cut the input lag clean in half? Well, if we take a look at the FPS difference, you might see why. On the High preset, this machine was clocking 249 FPS average. On Medium it hit just shy of 400 FPS. How, you might ask? Well if we take a look at the settings page on the High preset, you’ll find FidelityFX Super Resolution is disabled. Now if we switch to Medium, you’ll see it’s now enabled and on the “Quality” preset. Bearing in mind the fact that the display I’m using here is a 240Hz panel, the fact that enabling FSR and lowering a couple of the settings can still HALF the latency is incredible, and a mirror of the results I found in Rainbow Six Siege. AMD really has made some special sauce here…
Seeing as there is such a difference between High and Medium, you’d kind of expect Low to bring the same sorts of gains. Sadly, that isn’t the case. Low only drops around half a millisecond off, down to 10.5 milliseconds in total. So, for the base presets, there’s your spread. Medium or Low both work perfectly well, with basically the same performance anyway, but there are a few more combinations I’d like to try out. First is enabling NVIDIA Reflex. On the Low preset, Low with Reflex and Boost does nothing – in fact it makes the average worse by 0.1 milliseconds. If, for some insane reason, you wanted to play CS2 on the Very High preset, Reflex does a good job, bringing the average to just under the High preset result at 21.2 milliseconds, down from 27 milliseconds without Reflex. But, like, don’t use Very High. Just don’t.
Moving back to the Low preset, I thought it’d be interesting to change the FSR settings to stick it on Ultra Performance, up from the Balanced mode the Low preset uses. That drops the result by a 1.5 milliseconds, and at least at 1600p it doesn’t harm the image quality too badly, and so is a perfectly usable setting, and the best result so far. If you are wondering what VSYNC does to your latency – keep in mind this is a 240Hz display meaning it is one of the faster panels on the market – yeah that ain’t great either. Even using the Low preset with FSR on Ultra Performance, it jumps to double at 18.6 milliseconds. That’s dreadful, so obviously don’t use VSYNC if you care about a low latency experience.
The last thing I wanted to try was dropping the resolution down to 1200p to see if that made any difference. Surprisingly, it didn’t. The average did drop a touch more down to 8.7 milliseconds, but it’s hardly a worthwhile change even on this 4060 Laptop chip. Some systems might react better to that change, but at least on my system here, it doesn’t make much difference, although I think I know why. If I stick up the FPS results from those tests, you might see a bit of a pattern. Despite running the fps_max 0 command on startup – I always do for any benchmarks – CS2 seems to be limited to around 415 FPS, at least on this system. If anyone more familiar with CS in general has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them in the comments below on that. Still, the lack of FPS improvement, coupled with the lack of pipeline optimisations available – ie reflex does nothing on Low – means you don’t see any major improvements. Still, seeing the difference from just turning FSR on at all is such a big jump that it seems worth doing regardless of what settings you’re playing at!
So, to summarise, the Low and Medium presets are about the same, both in performance and in latency. Setting FSR to Ultra Performance does net you a small advantage, so it’s probably worth doing that too. Dropping resolution doesn’t seem to do much, at least on my system, so feel free to play at your native resolution and know you’re getting pretty much the best experience here.
