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Imagine we could do anything to CS:GO’s graphics that we wanted. Forget about Source
1’s limitations. Forget that the game is unlikely to be fully ported across to Source
2 any time soon. Forget for a moment that even Source 2 will have limitations! What
could CS:GO benefit from? First of all, I’ll cover what I DON’T
think should be added. The first of which is raytracing. Don’t get me wrong: it’s
a cool technology! Imagine being able to see enemies creeping up behind you in your AWP’s
scope! Imagine using a shiny pole to spot an enemy from around a corner. Imagine CS:GO
actually looking as good as real-life. Awesome. But there are many reasons for why this shouldn’t
be added. It will be years before most PCs will be able to run it. And even then, is
it worth the frame-rate drop? Everybody wants high framerates in CS:GO. I can’t think
of a more demanding graphics option than raytracing. For those reasons alone, it shouldn’t be
added. Another cool thing I can think of would be
DESTRUCTION! It used to be a big thing in games 10 years ago, and I feel it’s coming
back into fashion again now. And rightly so! Imagine hiding behind a crate only for bits
of it to be shot out. Or for footprints being left behind in the sand. You could have custom
shoe-treads! I hope you’re making notes, Valve. Or how about being able to bore a hole
through a wall to get a sneaky sightline into a bombsite. Or shooting a wall to deny the
other team a set up grenade bounce they’ve been using! Destruction has more potential
to change CS:GO’s gameplay than raytracing does!
But for both these things, while they might be cool, I don’t know if they’d fit CS:GO’s
‘vision’. Yes, they’d change the gameplay. They’d add some new possibilities. But you’ve
got to look at what would be left behind, and you’d be saying goodbye to an already
balanced, polished game that has an ultra-competitive community who I don’t think would welcome
changes like these, even if they seem cool at first. If Valve ever considered these features,
they’d be big enough changes to warrant a brand new game and title.
Good news for those who want destruction, there’s already a competitive game with
that sort of stuff- Rainbow Six Siege! It’s proof that it could work in a competitive
game. But it becomes the focus of the gameplay. Adding it to CS:GO would change the gameplay
so much that it wouldn’t be CS:GO any more. And that’s why I don’t think CS:GO should
get destruction. They’ve even tried it already- CS:S introduced physics and breakable items-
some that could even influence the gameplay, like being able to hide a planted bomb under
a barrel, or to block a corridor with a barrel. Or to jump inside a prop to hide out of view!
Or even just to shoot a hole in the wall of Inferno’s apartment, right here. And tossing
a grenade into this room would freeze everybody’s PCs for a split second, buying you the element
of surprise! …if these things sounded gimmicky, that’s because they were, and they perhaps
weren’t what Valve was hoping to achieve by adding interactive items into Counter-Strike.
So they have since toned back again, returning more to how it was before. So it isn’t like
Valve hasn’t tried it.
With those exciting things covered and dismissed, it’s onto the main bit of the video. And
while these upcoming suggestions might not be as cool as DESTRUCTABLE ENVIRONMENTS, I
believe they would complement CS:GO’s gameplay a hellolaolot better.
Starting with DirectX12 / Vulkan. Typing mat_configcurrent into the console shows that CS:GO’s still
using DirectX 95?!?! Nah that’s DirectX 9 and a bit. The beauty of newer APIs such
as DirectX12 and Vulkan is that they can allow for better performance! How? Well, I don’t
want to bore you with the details. Also I’m cos I’m a bit unsure about them myself.
But it means that games can better use your PC’s hardware to its maximum potential.
It can reduce CPU overhead- which is useful in CPU-limited game such as CS:GO. Just look
at how Vulkan improved how these cards performed in Doom at 1080p.
And we’re in luck- Source 2 supports Vulkan (among others)- and DOTA 2 got support for
it a few years ago. This is important, because if DOTA 2 can get a feature, then so can CS:GO.
I even found a fascinating 2 and a half hour-long talk about it. I’m sure you’re already
closing this video down to watch it all for yourself, but I’ll summarise it here:
They admit that DOTA 2 isn’t the ideal game to be running on Vulkan. It isn’t limited
by things that Vulkan can help with, and they only used a few of its features. And yet they
were still very happy with it! When not a lot was going on, performance on
Vulkan actually went down. BUT- here’s the important bit- during battles, Vulkan performed
the best. In other words, when the game needs performance the most, Vulkan does the best.
This means that it’ll make games run smoother and more consistently, and with better minimum
framerates. He says this latency reduction is important
for esports games, and that their Vulkan support is only going to get better.
In conclusion, Valve loves Vulkan and I’d be very surprised if this is the last we hear
of it from them. As if they need more reason to add it to CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege got
Vulkan support last month, and it has improved performance for at least a
Fewoienafodhnasgo
-for at least a few of the people who have tested it.
The next thing I’d like would be NEW ANTI-ALIASING METHODS. CS:GO currently has FXAA and MSAA.
Which are like, the oldest methods everrr! FXAA doesn’t slow things down much, but
is blurry. That’s kind of all it does- it blurs things. There are similar, but better
post-process methods like SMAA, MLAA, TXAA, which can all provide smooth images. But while
all these methods run quickly, they often come with their own downsides. Temporal is
probably the most popular in modern games- it uses information from earlier frames to
help smooth current ones. But this can sometimes lead to weird artefacts and blur behind moving
things, which now I’ve pointed out, you’ll be aware of and annoyed by forever more! HAHAHA.
MSAA is a proper anti-aliasing method that adds extra detail to the image! But this comes
at the expense of framerate. 2x MSAA uses 2 samples per pixel, 4 uses 4 and so on. But
it only works on some items, so fences and bushes won’t always benefit from this. Its
bigger brother is SSAA, which literally renders the game at a higher resolution and then crushes
it down. This results in excellent visual quality, but it slows it down a lot cos it’s
like running the game at a much higher resolution. 4XSSAA at 1080p would be like gaming at 4K,
for example.
But maybe there’s a way of getting better anti-aliasing AND better framerates…
…CHECKERBOARD RENDERING! The Xbox One X and Playstation 4 Pro use this to reach 4K
resolutions. They’re not really 4K- they simply render every other pixel, making a
checkerboard effect, and then they fill in the rest with what they think would look right.
The result might not be as good as proper 4K, but it’s a lot better than the number
of pixels it’s rendering SHOULD look. Plus, it adds some degree of anti-aliasing to the
result as well. The beauty of this approach is the possibilities it enables:
1) You can game smoothly at higher resolutions than before
2) You can game at the same framerate as before, but with better anti-aliasing
3) You can game at the same resolution, but faster than before.
I was a bit jealous that consoles had this for a while, but the PC now has a similar
feature- Nvidia’s DLSS. I’ve been tracking it and it’s been improving. In its latest
iterations it’s actually very impressive, and bodes well for the future. Of course,
it would be great if it could be used by everybody, and not just Nvidia users. Variable Rate Shading
is a similar technology, in that it bunches groups of pixels together as though they’re
one. And this can also improve framerates with near-unnoticeable degradation to visual
clarity. And Valve already use a ‘reconstruction
filter’ around the edges of your vision in VR- it assumes you won’t be looking here,
so can get away with a lower resolution than in the centre of your vision. This improved
performance by 5-15% on their VR level, claiming it ‘almost always’ led to ‘big savings
on low-end GPUs’. In other words- it helped to give higher framerates to those who needed
it the most. Sounds great for those struggling by on CS:GO.
Forget about framerates now. What about graphical improvements? I think it would be nice to
have higher resolution gun textures. Some of them already look sharp, like the P250.
But on the bigger weapons, the texture resolution loses some of its clarity. The worst offender
is the AUG, which, with some finishes, looks like something from the early 2000’s! The
problem is that it uses the same sized texture as a smaller gun, so must stretch it more.
I think they should quadruple the resolution on guns like this to make them something you
can be proud of owning. I’d also like higher shadow settings. When
I look at the level, the clarity is fine- in fact it’s too good. More on that in a
bit. But when I look at my gun model, the pixellation is obvious and I wish there was
a way of reducing that effect. I think for the people who care, or for those who just
want to showcase their gun skins, there should be an ultra high shadow quality setting to
smooth out the shadows on your weapon models! Meanwhile, the levels themselves have shadows
which are too sharp! Sharp shadows are cast by small light-sources. But the sun is not
small. It appears as a sizeable ‘circle’, and should thus cast shadows which get increasingly
blurry, the further away from the object that’s casting them.
Funnily enough this is something that older versions of Counter-Strike did better than
CS:GO- or at least, would have, had the shadows been baked at a high enough quality to show
it! But then, filesize was the problem with this approach in the first place. So while
I think the move to real-time shadows is a considerable improvement in most regards,
the older ‘baked in’ methods HAD THE POTENTIAL to more accurately simulate reality in this
regard. Just to show it’s possible to be done in real-time, here’s an example from
Red Dead Redemption 2. Note how the edges of this post’s shadow get blurrier towards
the top. Even if for some reason the cables don’t. Bang. I’m hoping this is one aspect
that Source 2 will improve upon- and if it is, I’d like to see it ported back to CS:GO.
While I don’t want raytracing, I still think the reflections could be improved by adding
parallaxing to the cubemaps! Right now, no matter where you are in a room, the reflections
on your gun will remain fixed to the centre of the area. But parallaxed cubemaps will
imitate the shape of a boxy room, appearing to move about the room as you do. In a best-case
scenario, the result can look similar to raytracing! And in a worst-case… well, let’s not go
there. The beauty is, parallaxing can be added to cubemaps without much of a performance
impact at all. And many modern games support it. Even this starscape features it- and this
was added to CS:GO just a few months ago! It seems like Valve are getting there, one
step at a time.
CS:GO’s smoke grenades could also do with an overhaul- for gameplay reasons! They’ve
had a few changes and updates to try and fix problems with them, but some remain and it’s
horrible to see them so obviously sticking through walls that they shouldn’t be sticking
through. I propose Valve scrap the current ones and design them from the ground-up to
provide more consistent cover on all graphics settings, and maybe to figure out a way of
stopping them from passing through thin walls. I don’t expect real-time smoke physics,
cos they’d be extremely graphically demanding. But you can check out how awesome they’d
look in examples such as this one. Look at how, when it reaches a wall, it bounces off!
And lastly, I’d like to see the AWP obey the laws of physics! Right now, you can approach
pretty much any surface made of a displacement and make it disappear into the wall. It’s
not hard. It’s frustratingly easy. I discovered like, 4 new spots in the space of about 30
seconds here. It only seems to happen with the AWP, and I’m sure a tiny adjustment
to the model’s centre-point would fix this. Please Valve, stop the AWP from disappearing,
through a wormhole without a trace. Only VPNs should allow you to do that.
Any way. These suggested changes may not be as cool-looking as raytracing, but I think
they’re more relevant to CS:GO. What would YOU like to see? Subscribe to find out. Maybe.