Nearly a year after its September 2023 launch, Counter-Strike 2 has received the first batch of community maps. Thera and Mills have been added to the Competitive, Casual, and Deathmatch map groups, Memento and Assembly to the Wingman map pool, and Pool Day to the Arms Race map pool.
This Counter-Strike 2 update also makes it easier to gain badges and improves the MVP panel, with Premier matches getting a new animated panel. Finally, a bunch of new graphics-related settings (including a dedicated frame pacing option) are available for tweaking, as detailed below.
- Settings Recommendations
- Added a Settings Recommendation popup if your display's refresh rate is set below its maximum at startup. Using your display's highest refresh rate is generally recommended.
- Added a Settings Recommendation popup if NVIDIA G-Sync support is detected but not enabled at startup. Using G-Sync is generally recommended if your system supports it.
- Added a Settings Recommendation popup if NVIDIA G-Sync is enabled but not V-Sync and/or NVIDIA Reflex. It is generally recommended to enable all three settings together when they are available. Note that applying these settings will limit your frame rate to your display's refresh rate or slightly lower, which is usually the smoothest-looking and lowest input latency settings combination.
- Removed "Main Menu Background Scenery" and "Item Inspect Background Scenery" settings from the Video Settings page. These settings are still available on the Main Menu and in the Item Inspect screens respectively.
- The "Refresh Rate" setting now shows your display's current refresh rate in Windowed and Fullscreen Windowed modes.
- Removed the "Laptop Power Savings" setting which has never actually been configurable in CS2.
- Added a "Frame Pacing" section to the Advanced Video settings page.
- Added an "NVIDIA G-Sync" row to the Frame Pacing section which tells you whether or not G-Sync is active with your current display settings. This row may be hidden if you're using the Vulkan renderer or if you're not using an NVIDIA graphics card.
- Added "Maximum FPS In Game" and "Maximum FPS In Menus" sliders to the Frame Pacing section. These control the fps_max and fps_max_ui convars respectively.
- Increased the default "Maximum FPS In Menus" setting from 120 FPS to 200 FPS.
- The Advanced Video visual preview now uses the "In Game" maximum FPS instead of the "In Menus" maximum
Counter-Strike 2 remains the most popular game on Steam, with the exception of rare peaks like PUBG and Palworld. In the last 24 hours, Valve's competitive first-person shooter game registered a peak of 1.37 million players, over twice as many as the second game (Dota 2, also made by Valve).
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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