Introduction

Everybody has heard of Counter-Strike, Valve's most successful multiplayer shooter. Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) is the latest installment in the popular Counter-Strike series. It marks a departure from the traditional iterative approach, introducing significant improvements in maps, weapons, and visuals. Notable changes include enhanced smoke physics, impacting gameplay strategies. The game features improved UI, dynamic lighting, and particle effects, creating a refreshed visual experience.


While CS:GO is built using the first version of the "Source" engine, Counter-Strike 2 uses the more modern Source 2 engine, which was first released in 2015 and powers titles like Dota 2 and Half-Life: Alyx. The game uses the DirectX 11 API, there's no ray tracing or DLSS. NVIDIA Reflex is available though, and FSR 2 can be enabled as well.

This benchmark review will evaluate the performance of Counter-Strike 2 on a wide selection of modern graphics cards, show image quality comparisons and look at what's required in terms of VRAM usage.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at "very high" settings, with FSR disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The game supports windowed, borderless and fullscreen.
• On a laptop, the power settings can be disabled, to maximize gaming FPS

• There's four quality presets "Very High," "High," "Medium" and "Low"
• V-Sync can be disabled completely, there is no hidden FPS cap
• Unlike most other games, multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) is available, it can be selected up to 8xMSAA
• Besides that there's many options to improve performance, and on top of that there's dozens of console configuration variables to further fine-tune everything. It looks like almost everything from CS:GO can be used.