What are the best CS:GO launch options?

Like so many other games on Steam, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gives you the option to use specific commands before launching the application, overwriting certain base settings of the title. This can help you out in many different situations ranging from troubleshooting to quality of life improvements. For the competitive CS:GO player, every little edge matters a lot, and these could provide a nice little bonus for you if you know what you’re doing. Here’s how to get them working alongside a list of the most effective ones that can help you up your game:

How to use launch options

Navigate to your Steam library and look for CS:GO (or any game you’d like to use launch options for). Right-click on it and select “Properties”. Once a new window has opened, click on “Set launch options”, this is where you should enter the launch options of your choosing. Each of them are formatted like -[this] and if you want to include multiple ones, you only need a space between each of them, so make sure to not include semicolons or commas.

The best launch options

-novid If you are sick and tired of the Valve intro, this will get rid of it for good.

-high If you’re running CS:GO on an older computer, this could be a godsend for you: it runs the game in a high CPU priority mode which could help you squeeze out a little bit of extra performance. Your mileage may vary in terms of results, but it’s definitely worth a try.

-tickrate 128 This only affects your offline matches, but it can still be a nice improvement to bump up your servers for bot matches if you’d like to use that kind of thing for practice.

-full Forces the game to run in fullscreen mode.

- windowed -w (enter width here) -h (enter height here) -x (insert position here) -y (insert position here) This launches the game in a window with your specified resolution and its position on your screen; of course, it’s incompatible with the previously listed launch option.

-threads (enter number here) Another way to improve your performance: “letting the game know” how many CPU cores your machines have, therefore giving it access to all of them can also improve your performance.

-nod3d9ex1 This command speeds up Alt-Tabbing.

-refresh (enter desired refresh rate here) If you monitor’s refresh rate goes above 60, this option allows you to set the game to match it. Keep in mind that you should not use this otherwise as it could cause damage to your hardware.

If you’d like to use these CS:GO launch options, copy and paste this string below into your launch options (without the quotation marks):

-novid -high -tickrate 128 -full -nod3d9ex1