Right now, I’m using an Intel 13900K processor, and a Geforce 4090 graphics card.
And my motherboard has wifi.
That makes my PC… one of the fastest gaming PCs in the world right now.
This sort of opportunity doesn’t come around too often, nor does it last very long.
And I don’t want to squander my one chance to do something really worthwhile with this
amount of power, so today I’m going to go about maps in CS:GO, staring at the ground
to see how high my framerate can reach.
Welcome, to GETTING HIGH, in CS:GO.
Judging from these components, you might think that this video would be sponsored by Intel,
or Nvidia.
But you’d be wrong!
Because this video is sponsored by Nordvpn: the company that provides ALMOST 5,650 servers
in ALMOST 60 countries.
By now, you know already how VPNs work and what they can do- if not, then the link in
the video’s description will tell you more.
But today, I’m going to talk about the OTHER things their service provides.
For instance, using meshnet, instead of connecting to a VPN server, you can connect to ANOTHER
COMPUTER directly over the internet, and to access the internet from their network instead.
This essentially means you can host a LAN party over the internet- meaning you don’t
even have the hassle of seeing your friends any more.
Incredible.
Nordvpn features a growing list of its own protective features to serve as a security
layer between you and the internet, of which you can toggle on and off, depending on what
you need.
There are tracking blocks, malicious site blocks, ad blocks, and even a virus scan for
downloaded files.
These features can be active even when you’re not connected to a VPN server.
And lastly, their desktop app has a sleek new user interface, which looks nice 😊
NordVPN comes with a 30 day money-back money guarantee and, using the code ‘kliks’,
you can get the 2 year deal for EVEN MORE of a discount than they’re already offering,
AND an extra month free month on top of the 3 already offered.
Using the code ‘kliks’.
In order to get the highest framerates possible, the first thing you should do is to remove
the framerate cap.
In Counter-Strike, it used to be 300, but PCs got faster and Valve at some point upped
it to 400.
Just in case you wondered why you were never getting more than that.
You can permanently remove it completely by going to CS:GO’s properties in steam like
so, and by typing in +FPS_max 0.
This will unlock the framerate.
Also make sure you don’t have v-sync forced on in your graphics card’s control panel
or anything like that.
You’ll know if you do because your framerate in-game will be limited to 60, or 144, or
whatever refresh rate your monitor is.
Although, before we embark down this road of high fps discovery, I must warn you: do
you REALLY want to go there?
Especially with energy prices rising the way they are, wouldn’t you rather limit your
framerate and get sick efficiency gains instead?
Hi, I’m EKliksPhilip.
And I’m all about the EFFICIENCY.
And I’m frankly DISGUSTED by 3kliksphilip’s choice of PC.
Here I am, wrapped up warmly in bed, gaming on the Steam Deck for minimal power consumption
and sucking at the air for my moisture requirements, while he’s in there, blinding himself with
a monitor that’s brighter than the SUN!
But, if you are going to be gaming on a beastly setup, let me give you some tips on how to
rack up high-scores in-game, but NOT on your energy bill.
Hahaha.
So, most people know that buying a 1000 watt PSU doesn’t mean it’ll always consume
1000 watts.
Well done!
What it means is that it can provide your computer with UP to 1000 watts of power.
Which could mean that it’s consuming 1200+ watts of power because they’re not 100%
efficient!
But don’t test that.
You don’t want to be running at 100% load- because PSU’s tend to be most efficient
at about 50%, so for that reason, it’s good to get one that’s rated at double the power
your system will be consuming.
Of course, my gorgeous little Steam Deck can quite happily run CS:GO, and the whole thing
consumes just 25 watts of power!
Meanwhile, that stinky, poo-ey old Geforce 4090 over there is rated at 450 WATTS- but
overclocked, it can reach as high as 600, or maybe even 675 watts!
That’s like, the energy draw of a microwave inside the computer!
Or 27 Steam Decks.
You don’t need it.
You’re not good enough at the game to JUSTIFY that level of power-draw.
So instead, cap your framerate and drop your power consumption.
I did a few tests.
Uncapped, the processor and graphics card were consuming 300 watts of power!
OH NO!
But capping it to 500 dropped that to 180, and at 144 hz, the graphics card was consuming
just 52 watts of power, and the processor, 44.
Which is… actually less than less powerful components would be.
I wonder if you could help me.
I have long wondered which is the most efficient way to travel at 90 mph: would it be in a
more powerful car that’s being exerted less, or in a less powerful car that’s being fully
maxed out?
Of course, the correct answer is neither of those things.
It’s to go at 65 mph in the yaris and to annoy everybody behind you.
Ekliksphilip OUT!
Now, let’s disable that framerate cap and make this planet suffer!
We’ve got to make the game as easy to run as possible.
That means no bots.
DEFINITELY no bots!
Those things suck up so much CPU power that you’d think they’d actually be decent
at playing the game.
You also want to remove the gun model- because every little helps!
And, a little bit surprisingly, you’ll also want to remove the HUD.
Try it on your PC.
See what sort of framerate boost that gives you.
So apparently, HUD-less flybys don’t just look good- they RUN good as well.
Run well… as good.
Run well as well.
Next, you’ll want to drop the settings as far as you can go.
You CERTAINLY don’t want to play at 8K, high settings.
That would be a FOOLISH thing to do!
Running about Dust2 for a minute at 8K high settings, I got an average of just 307 FPS.
At this high resolution, it’s the Geforce 4090 that’s limiting us, pumping out a meagre
10 BILLION pixels a second.
If it output that many pixels at 720p then we’d be getting 11,000 frames a second.
At that point, you definitely won’t be able to blame your PC when you still lose!
We…
obviously won’t get 11,000 frames a second.
But dropping the resolution will ease the load off the graphics card, making it more
about how powerful the CPU is instead, for reasons I explained 6 months ago in THIS video.
Running about Dust2 at the low resolution of 4K scored a more acceptable result: it
averaged 973 frames a second, with a 1% low of 426 and a ‘maximum’ FPS of… 1,712.
…Which is alright, I guess.
I repeated the tests at 1080p and 720p, high settings.
But the framerate didn’t go up by much.
This is because, like I said, the CPU has become the bottleneck.
The Intel 13900K just isn’t good enough to go any faster, no matter how powerful the
graphics card is that it’s paired with.
My best result wasn’t even at the lowest resolution- but was in fact at 1080p, where
I got an average of 989 FPS.
Frustratingly close to 1000!
But something strange was going on.
*STEP STEP STEP* In some areas, particularly around B and inside
the tunnels, my footstep sounds got faster than normal, and while it could have just
been the INCREDIBLE framerate I was getting, I could swear I was moving faster, too!
And I can confirm that I was, in this example here.
*STEP STEP STEP*
I wasn’t sure how to confirm exactly how many frames a second is needed to trigger
this speedhack- because using any value greater than 1000 in CS:GO’s fps_max command just
seems to restrict it to 1000.
Clearly, Valve never thought their game was going to run this quickly.
…and let’s be honest: none of us did.
Super-high framerates isn’t really something that’s widely discussed online.
If you try to Google it then you’ll mostly people complaining that their framerate isn’t
fast enough!
Although I did find this one person over on reddit crying that hitting 1,250 fps was causing
their PC to stutter and to lag.
This predictably attracted lots of salty comments, as well as a few other individuals who used
it as an opportunity to brag about THEIR FPS!
Imagine being sad enough that you have to brag about your high framerate online.
Joke’s on them- because my framerate’s EVEN HIGHER!!!
I wasn’t getting any lagging or stuttering, though- my experience was silky smooth, albeit
at a faster running speed.
Does this mean I have speedhacks?
I connected to an empty server that was hosting an aim map, and while I had no problem when
I was facing the bulk of the map, when I turned around and stared at the wall, my fps must
have risen beyond the threshold, and I too started stuttering and lagging.
I think this is because I’m moving faster than I should be and to prevent this, the
server is teleporting me back to where I should be stood instead.
Poor me.
It turns out that, beyond 1000 fps… or maybe 1250- what differences does a few hundred
fps make at this point any way- CS:GO screws up and begins doing things at the wrong speeds.
Have you ever heard a high-pitched buzzing or whining sound coming from your PC?
And I’m not talking about that sound your teammates make when you’re losing 11-3 on
T side of Inferno.
No: I’m talking about the sort of sound you might hear on a loading screen, or one
that varies in pitch as you move your mouse about.
…if so, then it COULD be coil whine.
This PC isn’t too bad for it -THANK GOODNESS- but there are some horrifying examples of
it out there, like this one here.
EEeheeeeEEEEEeeeeEEEEHEHEHhhehhhhhhhhhhhh
It’s where electrical wiring inside your PC physically vibrates, and it gets particularly
noticeable as you reach MASSIVE FRAMERATES.
Which is exactly what I am doing.
This is supposedly fine, and it shouldn’t harm your PC, but that didn’t stop New World
from murdering fast graphics cards until they capped the framerate on the menu screens,
DID IT.
In New World’s case, Denofgeek advises that you should certainly not let your framerate
go above 60 FPS.
They then suggest you set your graphics settings to low, and to set your ‘max frame rate’
to off.
Funnily enough, these are all things that I’ll be doing to try and get the HIGHEST
framerates possible!
Am I concerned?
Always.
But not too much about this!
So let’s see if we can get the framerate EVEN HIGHER!
To be honest with you, with my computer being as aggressively CPU bottlenecked as it is…
I doubt that dropping the graphics settings will make a blind bit of difference.
But in the remotest, tiniest off-chance that high settings also adversely affect the CPU
load in some obscure way, I also ran about Dust2 at low settings.
‘LET’S GO!’
Oh look, it’s faster.
Who’d have thought it.
About 300 FPS more, putting me over 1250 fps a lot of the time and into the realm of silly
walks, letting me speedrun my way about Dust2 in record time.
It may not always be the case that lowest settings are always fastest, but for simplicity’s
sake, I’ll keep all graphics settings on low from now on, and will search for the highest
fps points on every map.
SO: time to find the highest framerate area in CS:GO!
The question you’ll want to ask is: how do I go about doing this scientifically?
To which the answer is simple:
I don’t.
I go around every map, looking at the wildly fluctuating framerate counter, and when that
first number transcends ‘1’ and looks particularly aggressively locked within the
realm of 2, or sometimes maybe even 3(!), I benchmark it for 5 seconds to get an average
framerate for that region.
You quickly learn you can rule out 99% of every map through common sense, and that 1%
that’s left is all those featureless-looking walls in the outmost corners of the map, of
which every map has somewhere between 3 and 5 of them which are worth benchmarking.
I did have a segment in this video where I investigated a weird anomaly that would cause
framerates to fixate around particular numbers, like 1024 and 2048… and more curiously,
other numbers like 819 and 1365.
Unfortunately, I never figured out what caused this anomaly to occur, nor what those numbers
meant, but a google search yielded a SINGLE JOURNAL that featured all those numbers in
a row, so there’s some sort of pattern going on here.
I was really curious about it and investigated this thing for the best part of 2 days but
the more I did, the more questions I had and I escaped that rabbit hole before going too
deeply.
But just so you know: if your framerate seems to plateau at a particular number, that isn’t
a hard limit within Counter-Strike, and probably just this weird number anomaly occurring.
RIGHT!
Highest framerate regions.
What did I learn from testing every corner on every different CS:GO map?
Turns out, I did learn some interesting things from doing this!
For a start: you can FORGET about the dangerzone maps.
It sounds obvious, ‘cos they always run the slowest, but when all the game’s having
to render is the dull, featureless room that you find yourself in, why should it matter
what else is in the level?
Turns out: it still does matter.
A lot.
So while the CPU might not be ‘rendering’ everything else on the map, it knows that
stuff exists.
And that alone is enough to slow it down more, for some reason.
So first conclusion reached: the smaller the map, the better!
Secondly: even on the easy-to-run maps, the easiest spots were almost always on the OUTSIDE
walls, facing away from the bulk of the map.
Probably for similar reasons as the one I just detailed.
What’s in the 3D Skyboxe also seems to matter.
Now, Vertigo has an especially detailed one of these, and looking down anywhere in the
map yielded a significantly lower framerate than looking up did.
So rule that stuff out, too.
And lastly: you can forget about areas with particles, like the outdoor regions of office
and militia.
All in all, this is all fairly common-sense stuff, but it surprised me HOW MUCH of an
impact all this still had on my setup.
ANY WAY!
I tested every map in the game- even the ones you forgot existed like ST MARC.
AND THESE WERE MY RESULTS!
After selecting the highest average and ‘MAXIMUM’ framerate achieved on every map.
Take all of these with an enormous pinch of salt, mine-d: I tested some areas several
times and got results several hundred frames a second different, every time.
I suppose that when you’re dealing with thousands of frames a second on the most technologically
advanced components ever made, stuff is always happening to change your result, depending
on the components’ temperatures, the game’s tickrate, fluctuations in electrical components,
which direction your feet are pointing and whether or not you brushed your teeth this
morning.
But what you gonna do.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the oldest and smallest maps in the game which get the highest framerates-
though honourable mention to Agency for somehow beating every other ‘large’ map in the
game… and despite its complicated skybox!
I suppose that safehouse is the ‘winner’ here, since I got the highest result on it,
though I think you could get a great result on any of these top maps, provided it’s
a good day, and that your feet are pointing in the right direction.
Just avoid Ancient, which WAS the slowest of all the maps tested.
Even more so than the dangerzone ones!
But that being said, it did run highest settings faster than Dust2 did, so it’s not all bad.
But we’re not looking for lowest framerates here.
And I scored the HIGHEST maximum framerate on Baggage, which was unfortunately the first
I tested and so I remained unimpressed for the rest of the day’s testing, slipping
into a mild depression by the early afternoon.
I don’t like maximum framerate, for the same reason I dislike minimums.
All it takes is for a slight blip in your processing power, or for your left foot to
be pointed in the wrong direction and suddenly one of the few benchmarking numbers that people
will eventually see is wildly different from the rest of your experience with it.
So while the ‘maximum’ framerate will be the one that everybody remembers from this
video, just know I don’t like it.
I will now pull out all the stops, and will test Safehouse and Baggage to see how high
I can get their framerates.
*Splat*
First thing to go is the framerate counter, which itself is probably dropping these scores
a bit!
I will be relying on frameview’s invisible counting to track these numbers.
Which I’ve been using throughout this video already so, no problem there.
And next, I’ll download some dodgy FPS-boosting config that does everything it can to make
CS:GO look even worse than it does already!
And then, of course, we’ve got to ask: how far should we go?
Because believe me: I can go a long way.
I can disable the skybox.
I can disable the lighting.
I can disable the textures, and even the ground!
At some point though, this stops being CS:GO.
THIS is where I drew the line.
For some, I may have gone too far already.
For others, I went too far about 10 minutes ago.
While others are probably asking why I haven’t gone further by creating my own map with nothing
in it.
But whatever!
I tested the highest framerate areas in safehouse and baggage again, being sure to get lots
of benchmarks in the same areas so I could pick the highest.
And THIS was the highest average spot I got, 2,418 FPS average.
…but Baggage remained the best for maximum FPS, and for a very brief moment in this particular
spot, I scored 4,486 frames a second.
Impressed?
You’d better be.
For this, is what peak performance looks like.
So what is the maximum framerate achievable in CS:GO?
It’s hard to say.
For even those of you on a potato of a PC can score thousands of frames a second by
playing a demo file and by slowing it down.
The game multiplies your frames a second by how much it’s been slowed down by.
But that’s cheating!
But maybe…
so is disabling the HUD.
Maybe so is testing on an empty server where there’s no sort of game being played!
Maybe testing on unreleased hardware is cheating.
How am I supposed to know.
But I think it’s safe to say that it’s the Intel 13900K processor, that is determining
my maximum framerate here.
I could have overclocked it, but it is already hitting 5.8 Ghz- so I really don’t really
see the point when modern processors are so good at boosting themselves as far as your
cooling solution will allow them to- if I wanted better performance I’d probably have
to switch to liquid cooling.
Or liquid nitrogen!
And an exorcism.
It might be easier just to switch to faster RAM instead.
Further afield, AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series of processor is pretty fast too.
Depending on the benchmark you use, it might even be ahead of the 13900K in CS:GO!
But beyond that… we may be waiting on AMD to combine their X3D memory with their 7000-series
of processors, which, depending on the game, can sometimes dramatically boost performance.
That will likely come out sometime next year.
But maybe, rather than asking how fast we can run CS:GO, we should instead be asking
ourselves: how fast, is fast enough?