I’m like a child in a sweetshop with Source 2. So many things to cover,
so little time. So I’ve dedicated this video to the simple question of: ‘Like-for-like,
how does CS2 perform compared to CS:GO, on my main PC?’ I intend to test other,
slower and FAR more interesting setups in another video. And if all you care about is the question,
then I can answer that now very briefly by saying that Counter Strike 2 runs slower, by about 20-30%
at low settings. But this drops down to about 7% slower at high settings. But it is still slower.
And at 1080p resolution, it was always CPU limited. But then, that’s to be expected since
the Geforce 4090 graphics card is a BEAST. So I figured there are 3 kinds of people:
those who want the highest performance, and for those people I’ll be testing the lowest
settings. The next group of people are the ones who want the best looking game- for whom I’ll
be testing the highest settings. And the third lot of people are the ones who mix and match settings,
who I’m going to leave bitterly disappointed by ignoring completely. All my testing will
be done at 1080p resolution, without upscaling and without antialiasing.
Let’s start by comparing something simple: like-for-like spots, with nothing going on,
just to get a feel for the average framerates. The average of all 10 spots tested was 1100 fps
in CS:GO, which dropped down to 850 FPS average in Counter Strike 2. Which is a drop of 23%.
But if we look at the image quality, then we can see that this drop wasn’t for nothing.
For Valve has definitely targeted a better-looking minimum standard in
Counter Strike 2 than they had in CS:GO. Flicking back to the old game again,
it’s shocking how sparse Dust2 in CS:GO looked at low settings! All the nice little details, gone.
Poof.
So let’s compare both games at highest settings. The average of all the locations in CS:GO was 801
FPS, which dropped to 736 in CS2. This is a drop of just 7% on average. If you ask me,
there isn’t much difference between the image quality of both. Sure, the colours have changed.
But what’s actually displayed on-screen is very similar. Counter Strike 2’s materials look more
pleasing, and everything’s much brighter, which I’d argue works in Counter Strike 2’s favour,
since with CS:GO there are so many distracting black pixels around that you need antialiasing
as well in order to make it not look horrible, whereas the same sorts of details in CS2,
like the wires and shaded parts of the image, look less distracting and thus don’t
scream ‘anti-alias me’ quite so much. So if we are comparing high settings,
it means that CS2 results in a 7% FPS drop for a more visually pleasing image.
Maybe a fairer image comparison would be to compare CS:GO at high settings, VS
Counter Strike 2 at low, and if you do that then CS2 runs on average 7% faster, for a slightly less
detailed, but more readable and brighter-looking image. So it’s not too big a framerate drop,
given that 6 years have passed since the old version of Dust2 came out. And PCs have come a
long way since then… even if the prices haven’t. My next test involved running around the map
for 60 seconds. And again, Counter Strike 2 ran slower on lowest and highest settings.
What I love / hate about testing, and why I DO keep each test rather short,
is because there’s always some weird thing that I need to investigate further,
and it’s why these kinds of videos always take me longer than I expect them to. For instance:
CS:GO runs on DX9. Which is a really old standard. It was old even when CS:GO came out.
But Counter-Strike 2? It runs on DX11. Newer engine,
newer standard. That makes sense, doesn’t it. …But Valve has repeatedly sung the praises of
ANOTHER thing, called Vulkan, which is meant to reduce the overheads and
to yield better performance, especially when things get busy. Yet Counter Strike
2 doesn’t run on this mode by default. So I forced it to run on Vulkan,
and put it simply: I can see why it isn’t used by default! Highest settings ran noticeably
slower than dx11 did, and lowest settings were even worse, coming with about a dozen
noticeable stutters as I was running about. Don’t take away from this that Vulkan is
bad- I can’t rule it out being something to do with my particular PC setup, and it IS
something I plan to test on different PCs (and steamdeck) to see if it performs differently.
Let’s compare power consumption. Because I have a dark confession to make: I power-limit my
processor. A lot of the time you might see this as artificially limiting the PC’s speed. But I have a
13900K. And if you’re not power-limiting this thing then you’re doing it wrong.
I’ve limited it to 125 watts average, 175 watts maximum. Which is STILL A LOT! And it shouldn’t
be a problem in games, given how they tend to just use a few cores. So what’s INTERESTING
is that Counter Strike 2 manages to consume about 140 watts, while CS:GO averages just 90.
This suggests that Counter Strike 2 uses more processor cores than CS:GO can,
meaning it might benefit from MORE CORES than Source 1 games could! But to know how
many for sure, I ran around the map again, recording my screen to show CPU usage. Yes,
I know that’s a ridiculous number of threads. The important thing here is to see how many of these
threads here are being used, and by how much. So running CS:GO first, the answer to that
question is: unclear. Games tend to prioritise one core, and if the game is CPU-limited then
we’d expect to see maximum, 100% utilisation of this one particular core. That’s the theory,
at least. Turns out I don’t have much experience of viewing this kind of performance in action
because I don’t exactly game with all my threads showing on-screen like this. But here I am,
and the sheer amount of CPU utilisation we can see here surprised me. There is heavy usage on
-not just 1 like I expected- but about 4 of these threads! And even more surprisingly,
there was noticeable activity on all the other ones as well. Well I say all the others,
but you’ll notice extremely low utilisation on these lower 16 cores. This isn’t because CS:GO is
limited to using just 16 threads. I mean, it might be. But what’s more likely is that Intel/Windows
has taken steps to minimise usage of these bottom 16, since these are my 13900k’s E cores,
which are slower and laggier than the top 16 are for games. I’m fighting the urge to go
on a 10 minute discussion about these things, but I’ll just summarise here: E cores bad for
gaming. We don’t want Counter-Strike using these. And here’s the same test in Counter Strike 2. And-
oh no, the E cores are being used. And again, it’s hard to tell how many cores are needed -or indeed,
being used properly- but you can definitely see that Counter Strike 2 munches a lot more
CPU resources than CS:GO did. Which I suppose is GOOD? It means that Source
2 is distributing the workload across more of the system’s available resources. Because it
might as well. Yet despite being able to use more cores, the overall performance is still lower.
So here WAS going to be the end of my testing. Just for it to be
a quick little video to get a feel for how Counter Strike 2 runs on a fast PC,
and to discover where could require further research. But I couldn’t resist doing a bit more.
First I removed my power cap. Like I said, I felt my existing power caps should have
been well beyond Counter Strike’s power consumption. And sure enough,
uncapping my power consumption actually… dropped power consumption by a few watts.
You know how the slower, inferior E cores were being used a bit in Counter Strike 2? Next,
I disabled those, leaving JUST the 8 fast P-cores active.
Here are all of the ‘sensible’ configurations I tested. Don’t scrutinise these results and
deviations too much- I do that later with better data. All I want for you to take away from this is
that all their averages are notably higher than THIS one is, where I run CS2 with just 4 cores,
and that’s it. No hyperthreading, nothing special. Unless you’re using an old i5 processor
then you probably have more threads than this. Just 2 P cores next- that’s right! A dual core
processor, again without hyperthreading. I don’t think new processors even start down this low,
which is just as well because there were frequent micro stutters when playing like
this. Yet I was still getting almost 500 fps average. That’s because these
P cores on my processor are really fast. So I dropped my PC down to a single core. And
the results look much lower, but in practice it felt about the same as 2 cores did- still
hundreds of fps average, but frequent stutters. I was actually surprised by how well it was still
running if I’m honest, because the windows desktop experience by this point was getting pretty nasty
and unresponsive, and you can wave goodbye to alt+tabbing between stuff with just 1 core!
And then, for the LOLs, I enabled the 16 E cores again. So here is the result with just 1 fast
P core, and 16 E cores active. And amazingly it was perfectly playable! I wouldn’t recommend that
people run Counter-Strike like this because P cores are obviously preferable. But whereas
having E cores on dragged the minimums down when I had lots of fast P cores active, when I was
gaming with just 1 P core, the E cores actually helped raise the performance back up again.
And here’s a chart showing my CPU utilisation, and processor’s power consumption. Interesting
that disabling hyperthreading increases power consumption a bit, and as you can see,
Counter Strike 2 maxes out the single and dual core setups. As you’d probably expect. Now,
having hyperthreading on would help these configurations a bit but I feel my time testing
stuff could be better spent than that. So I revisited these top 3-performing
configurations, and repeated each of them 3 times, with a fresh restart between each of them,
to determine, ONCE AND FOR ALL, the best way to run Counter Strike 2. On my processor.
I usually hate charts like this. Cos it doesn’t start at 0, which can mislead you if you don’t
notice this. Then, there are 3 bars for each of the same configuration, which is messy. BUT in
this particular instance, it’s the perfect way to show you that you DO get higher average FPS,
first by disabling the E cores, and then further benefits still by disabling hyperthreading
as well. On my particular processor. Now if we show this graph properly, starting from
0, and with 1% lows and all that glorious stuff, it puts it more into perspective. None of these
are exactly slow. They’re all results that most people would LOVE to have in their games. Oh no,
my 1% low is only 250 fps, what am I going to do. Here’s a side-by-side comparison I just did,
the top one with hyperthreading and E cores on, and the bottom one with just 8 P cores and
nothing else. And I’ve just realised that while most people go by anecdotal experience but lack
hard data, I’m the opposite where I’ve got the hard data but can’t really describe what sort
of difference this makes in practice. Maybe with the E cores on, there’s a micro-stutter sometimes
when I’m about to turn a corner? I just couldn’t get a visible one on camera when I was trying in
this comparison. But look at the hard data: the 1% lows are almost always about 100 fps higher on the
bottom one where the E cores aren’t active. That is not an insignificant difference! And just stop
and think about this for a second- look at how much of an 8 core processor CS2 can utilise. That
is 4 cores maxed out, and the remaining 4 still being heavily utilised! This doesn’t mean that
you need an 8 core or 8 threaded processor. It just means that CS2 could still benefit from it.
Now’s as good a time as any to ask: how much performance do we really need? And how much
is worth spending to get it? Because neither a Geforce 4090, nor an intel
13900k is needed for a good showing in this game. I promised myself I’d keep this video simple, and
I failed. Because it turns out, it’s impossible! I do some tests, then I do some more investigation,
and then need to redo the previous tests with what I’ve learned since. So for my last trick,
I revisited the comparisons between CS:GO and CS2’s framerates from the beginning of this video,
but this time running CS2 on just 8 cores, without hyperthreading. I know this is an awful lot of
numbers so I’ll just highlight the ones that are relevant while I summarise the situation:
even with these optimal settings, CS2 still ran slower than CS:GO did at low settings,
but CS2 now runs 6% faster than CS:GO does if we compare high settings. And low settings in
CS2 now runs 22% faster on average than CS:GO does on high. BUT its 1% lows are still lower,
suggesting a less consistent framerate in CS2 for some reason I dare not speculate about.
At this point, you probably understand why these videos take so long to make. The more I discover,
the more investigations I want to carry out, and no matter how far I go,
it’ll only leave more areas open to criticism and further investigation. But that’s GOOD! I
don’t expect to get all the answers- only to find more questions that are relevant to ask.
So in conclusion: well, the same as my intro really. If you run CS:GO at high settings already,
then you’ll be able to run CS2 maybe slightly slower but it will look… fine. And it might
even run faster if you mess about with your processor’s configuration, but …is that cheating?
Is it really such a crime to compare out of the box settings? I’ll reserve my judgement for how
slower systems will perform until I’ve tested some for myself. I’m curious to see what users
of low resolutions think of using FSR combined with CMAA2 anti-aliasing, which I think produces
a look that you’ll either love or you’ll hate. For now at least, I was getting marginally
better performance without hyperthreading enabled, and having E cores on was BAD.
Moving away from my particular setup, there is one major thing to remember about CS2:
and that’s that, for people on slow PCs, Dust2 is one of the maps that’s going to change the least.
Because Valve has told us that maps will receive 1 of 3 different levels of overhaul. Dust2 has
had the smallest kind. Maps like Nuke look like they’ll get a bigger kind of upgrade, full of
fancier effects which may slow their performance down more. And last are maps like Overpass which
look to be getting complete transformations, so your performance on those maps may degrade the
most. But saying that, those maps probably run fastest right now, so their performance can drop
further before it becomes a problem. We’ll just have to wait and see.