A Counter-Strike 2 player found the best settings to avoid input lag after meticulous testing, and it turns out graphic quality isn’t the biggest problem.
When it comes to competitive games, players will do anything to gain an advantage, even if it means reducing their graphic quality and changing aspect ratios just to milk as much FPS and reduce as much input lag as possible.
This is why you often see so many of Counter-Strike’s best players meticulously tune their settings to the lowest possible quality in order to minimize as much lag as possible.
However, have you ever wondered how much impact each setting has when turned up to its max? A player too was curious and tested it in the Counter-Strike 2 Beta.
A player on the CSGO subreddit, Piwielle, decided to test CS2’s video settings to see which options cause the most lag, and there’s really only one setting you should always have turned off.
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According to Piwielle’s testing, Vertical Sync (VSync) does the most damage as it adds an additional 15 milliseconds of input lag, which is usual as it’s always good advice to disable it if you want more frames. So if you haven’t turned it off, you should.
The other setting that could impact your input lag is turning the Multisampling Anti-Aliasing mode up to 8x MSAA, this can add 0.89 milliseconds of lag, which is far better than enabling VSync.
Surprisingly, graphic settings like model, shader, and particle details when turned up too high or very high only add a minuscule amount of input lag, just at 0.15 milliseconds.
However, turning up the Global Shadow Quality and Ambient Occlusion seems to be the worst of the bunch as they both add 0.30 ms and 0.33 ms respectively.
Of course, the input lag that those settings add is minuscule in comparison to VSync, so if you do want to enjoy CS2’s beautiful usage of Source 2’s engine, it wouldn’t harm to leave it on high.
