CS:GO’s second update of the year has landed and the crowd goes mild.
The first update of the year apparently brought some fps drops to Anubis. I don’t know what you’re
talking about- my Geforce 4090 seemed to run it perfectly fine! But fortunately, MuieLaSJW posted
this clip of the problem on the route leading down to middle from T spawn. I went and INVESTIGATED.
If I turn my wallhacks on, you can see what’s happening: far more of the level is being rendered
than needs be- it’s even rendering that corridor that CTs pass through to reach mid, which clearly
isn’t needed from this T-sided position. And I can confirm that, from CT’s perspective in middle,
it’s drawing the T side of the map as well. So whatever hole was causing this has been
sealed up in this latest update, and it’s no longer rendering entire
chunks of the map that it doesn’t need to be. You may still feel that it’s rendering more
than it needs to. And maybe it is. But I wouldn’t be too harsh on Valve for this. Because remember,
they are only a very small company, and also because Optimisation works in mysterious ways
-especially in the Source engine- and while this may seem like it’s rendering LITERALLY
hundreds of polygons when it doesn’t need to be, it could be that due to draw calls or whatever,
this could actually be beneficial to the engine and that it won’t be impacting your performance
as much as you might fear it would. I mean, it was before this update. But maybe it isn’t now.
Normally I’d expect complaints of low FPS to be coming from users on limited hardware. But
it wasn’t the case here- I saw an owner of a Geforce 1080 ti complaining- one using a
2070 and even a 4080 user with a 12900K was having complaints about the map, although to
be fair he was complaining about a crash and the rest were complaining about ONLY getting
over 100 fps on this map, so I think there’s a spot of fps counter-peeping going on here.
Although loading in such massive chunks of the level all at once can result in brief stutters,
which can be frustrating as well. So hopefully all that’s been improved in this update.
All the other changes are to Chalice and Boyard, which are two wingman maps added
to the game in December, so it’s to be expected that they’ll be getting updates post-release,
to iron out bugs now that the maps have undergone the intense scrutiny of the game’s massive
playerbase. I don’t think anybody’s particularly interested in these first few updates, becos it’s
not like any of us are familiar enough with these maps at the moment to appreciate the changes. But
Chalice deserves praise for being an almost full map make-over. Now, the original map was released
in 2018, so maybe Grapen’s mapping skillz have improved since then, or knowing the map was to
be officially featured in the game was the extra motivation required to continue work on it. But as
you can see… it’s a big visual make-over, with the map receiving a more refined and slightly
hazier look to it. It reminds me of the makeover that Inferno received when CS:GO first came out.
In fact, it’s such an overhaul that it’s strange the patchnotes even bothered to say that the grate
bars on this site have been made less intrusive when you consider there’s so much to say about
the rest of the level as well! Place names have been added to the nav file, so will appear in
the top left-hand corner of the screen wherever you are to help you with the callout locations.
Once clipping is made visible, you’d be hard-pressed to find a spot on the map that
hasn’t been changed in some way or another. And I can confirm that less of the map is now
rendered from a few locations- still more of it is visible than I’m used to seeing,
and while displacements are apparently faster to render than flat surfaces can be,
the sheer number of polygons on display here still surprises me. I guess the smaller size of wingman
maps means it doesn’t have to concern itself quite so much with optimization. But what do I know.
Boyard’s changes aren’t so drastic, though this update does still have a story to tell.
Now I pride myself in my detective work. For every patchnote I read I like to go on an adventure to
figure out where the issue originated from, ideally without bothering anybody else. But I
just couldn’t get anywhere with this patchnote, which says ‘Clipped boost onto top of arches
(Thanks Lazavelli)’. So I asked Quoting, the maker of the map, what this was all about and he said
that it was this spot here, which he was shown by a player named ‘Lazavelli’ during a wingman
match. Now that poor guy didn’t even know he was showing the maker of the map the problem,
and then Quoting was obviously all like ‘LOL get rekt I’m going to fix it now gg ez’.
As for the other changes... everyone, meet Joakaka1998. If you ever get your map accepted
into CS:GO, then he will come along and he will find dozens of things wrong with it.
DOZENS! Some of them will be incredibly minor, but he’ll still find them, and will point them out to
you. Stuff like, if you stand at the edge of your map and zoom into a random doorframe beyond the
confines of your level then you’ll see a pixel gap. Or, stuff like: in this easter-egg room,
far away from the playable space, there’s still clipping when it’s not needed. At some
point stuff like this gets so minor that even the mappers don’t bother taking the
few seconds it would take to fix it, and I’m still gauging where my own cut-off point for
this kind of stuff is. At what point do YOU stop caring about this kind of stuff? For instance:
in this update, I couldn’t find the floating railing that has been fixed, but here’s another
floating railing that hasn’t yet been fixed. And I couldn’t find a gap in the side of
stairs that was fixed, but here’s one that remains unfixed. Literally unplayable.
But here, check out this cryptic-looking thing that I found outside the playable
space! What could this possibly mean? Yes, it is a reference back to the Fort Boyard
gameshow, which is a bit like the Crystal Maze but
French. But what do THESE letters mean? I mean it almost says ‘Chicken’ here.
It’s got ‘Nuke’ there and a ‘Quo’ there. Is there more to this or am I just overanalyzing
everything? Answers in the comments section below. And smash that subscribe button.
If you got this far then you MUST love changes that are so small and insignificant,
they could hardly be said to have occurred at all, in which case you’ll LOVE this video where I count
how many barrels there are in CS:GO, discuss what the perfect number would be and indeed,
what even IS a barrel any way. And here’s another one where I cover Dust2’s Spiral Stairs, in a
viral video that took the world by storm back when times were simpler and a little bit less clipped.