Valve’s latest CS:GO map, Ancient, continues the trend of looking prettier, and (possibly)
demanding more powerful hardware than the older maps did. For some people this will
be an inconvenience, for others it can make it literally unplayable.
The same thing happened when Nuke was remade in 2016, and again when Cache was remade in
2019. The problem with this is that people whose PCs used to be able to run the game-
no longer can. Which sucks for all those people out there chugging along on minimum spec systems.
So I tested the map with a few PCs of mine. Technical details will be in this video’s
description so as to keep this video as accessible as I can.
Last night, the map got an update. Some of this was to its gameplay, but there were a
few graphical changes as well. Visually, I didn’t see much of a difference- in some
places a few props had been removed, but in others, a few had been added. More were repositioned
or resized, but the general feeling I got from these changes was that they were done
to refine the look of the map, rather than to scale back on the visuals in a significant
way. Fewer trees at T spawn can be seen from middle, which I think was responsible for
the bulk of the framerate increases. A few shrubs got removed from A, but they only improved
framerates at low settings for me. Still, it’s moving in the right direction.
But I’ll warn you now that it didn’t seem like too great an improvement overall. I don’t
think you can hold out hope of this latest update making the map playable for you if
it wasn’t already. I tested 21 different locations across the map, on a fast and slow
PC of mine. And on average, at high settings my slow PC was only 1% faster, and my good
PC was 2% faster. A few sightlines here and there were maybe 5% better but it wasn’t
anything great enough to make a noticeable improvement.
But I saw greater improvements at low settings- which I suspect players will be running it
at if they were struggling with the framerates in the first place. My slow PC became 4% faster
on average, and my fast PC, 5% which equated to about 20 FPS more. Which is nice, though
it was sitting well above 300 FPS already. I’ll show you the spots where the biggest
improvements were felt. This sightline at T spawn was 11-16% faster
on low settings. This spot in middle was at least 4% faster
on any setting I tested. And this spot on A got about 8% better when
my PCs were on low settings. But how do these improvements compare with
other maps from the game? I tested a few spots from Cache and Inferno to see how Ancient
compared. And the results were surprising. Starting with my slow PC, a Ryzen 2200G which
is a 4 core CPU with integrated graphics, at high settings, Inferno ran at an average
of 50 FPS. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to play at these settings but bear with me
here. Cache was slower, at just 43 FPS on average… and Ancient was the slowest, at
40 FPS. So yes, Ancient is the slowest of the 3 maps, but not by much. I got 80% the
performance that I got from Inferno, which I think is a map that nobody has problems
running. But at LOW settings and resolution, things
changed a bit. Cache, for some reason, seems to be excellently optimised and ran 15% faster
than Inferno when on low settings and resolution. It was fast enough to drive a 144 hz monitor!
…provided you stand in a few key spots, on an empty server. And Ancient, again, is
the slowest, averaging 117 fps. Which I think is pretty good, given that we’re on integrated
graphics from 2018. It’s 88% the speed of Inferno, a map which came out 5 years ago
now. So yes, you can argue that Ancient is harder to run than older maps are, but it’s
not by a dramatic amount.
Now we’ll move onto my fast PC. And the results were surprising! Ancient ran faster
on this PC than Cache did, on high settings. And on low settings, Ancient ran faster than
Inferno or Cache did, and I was getting almost 400 FPS average on Ancient, so I can’t complain
about this new map at all.
But despite all this, it’s apparent that some people are still having problems with
this map. I’ve seen complaints about stuttering, lagging when viewing certain props, graphical
glitching and so on. If you ARE one of those people, then please post your system’s specs
in the comment section, together with the problems you’re having with the map. And
don’t forget to like and subscribe. Until I start seeing some patterns, I’m not even
going to speculate about what the problem could be.
In conclusion: on my slow PC, Ancient is a harder map to run than Inferno or Cache is,
but it’s still only 12-20% slower than Inferno, depending on the settings used. And on my
fast PC, while it’s roughly as demanding as the new Cache is at high settings, it’s
INCREDIBLY well optimised on lower settings, running much faster than the new Cache and
even Inferno. I can’t rule out there being problems for other people on other setups,
but I can’t complain about the performance I’m getting on it.
What is going on here? How can a newer, prettier map be running faster than Inferno? Well,
Counter-Strike’s a weird game. When the Nuke remake came out, I remember a very popular
reddit post pointing out how much was being drawn that didn’t need to be, suspecting
it was the reason for the lower framerates. And Jess Cliffe responded, saying that the
reason they’re being drawn is because it actually IMPROVES framerates for it to be
rendered in this way- drawing more resulted in a 40% average framerate boost! Even though
he admitted it seemed counter-intuitive. Another example is the new Cache, which FMPone
has constructed almost entirely out of displacements. You’d think it would make sense to make
flat walls out of a single brush, but displacements use dozens of polygons, being a tool designed
for bumpy surfaces. But this actually improves performance as well!
The Source engine is STRANGE. It was designed in an era when the software and hardware was
very different. The downside to this is that, today, it isn’t as optimised as it could
be. But the benefit of its age has been to enable mastery of the engine. I think that
Valve are better now than they were 5 years ago at squeezing as much out of it as they
can. The features they’ve rolled out to the game in recent years, like the texture
streaming and so on, might be better utilised in Ancient than they were in older maps such
as Inferno. You can’t just look at the map and say that
it’ll run slower than older maps will just because it appears to be more detailed and
complex. When I was making this video, I didn’t expect to discover that it would run even
faster than Inferno does on a modern, fast PC… but here we are.
I will admit the shortcomings of the test. I compared 21 spots in Ancient, and only 7
in the older maps. For example, I chose 3 places in A to benchmark when I was in Ancient,
while for Cache and Inferno I picked just one. So maybe the results I get are the ‘general’
performance of Ancient, against worst-case spots from Cache and Inferno. But I consider
those two to be well-optimised by this point, and any Counter-Strike player will know how
their rigs perform on these maps already. I would like for other people to repeat this
testing on their own systems because they may get different results, but from what I’ve
seen, I don’t think Ancient deserves the reputation it’s got of being a difficult
map to run. From my perspective, as somebody who plays
the game for all sorts of reasons, I welcome general graphical improvements. Because I
think they look nice, and they help modernise Counter-Strike, which is already hamstrung
by an ancient engine when compared with most other games out there. Just because a new
map might run slower than an older one does, it doesn’t change the fact that the performance
is still greatly beyond most competitive titles in this day and age.
Of course, Counter-Strike is a competitive game, and performance should come first and
foremost, but we’re talking about the Source engine here! Any half-decent PC from the last
10 years can get hundreds of frames per second out of this game. And with newer and faster
hardware coming out every year, in a way, the game has never been easier to run than
it is today. THAT BEING SAID, I do sympathise with players
who are running CS:GO on minimum spec hardware. For them, they don’t have 10% performance
to spare. They might already be running the game at borderline unplayable framerates.
Maybe these players don’t care about graphics at all and just want to be able to keep playing
the game that they’ve been playing for almost 10 years already. For some players, Ancient
might be the map that forces them players to stop playing the game.
But for the rest of us, there’s Mastercard.