CSGO FIX FOR STUTTERING AND LOW FPS+DROPS

Get rid of stuttering, micro lag spikes, dropping FPS!
A guide to get rid of Performance problems that you might experience with CS:GO.
I went from dropping between 70-120 FPS with stuttering or short freezes up to 220-250FPS and more stable frames

I am tinkering around like every few years because my old setup and Updates gives me problems even with CS every now and then.
I have a old CPU i7-2600k paired with a new GPU (RTX2070Super) and CSGO made me go crazy!
I can play most games in 1440P and high settings @+/-60FPS, but CS:GO was constantly stuttering and droping frames, since its heavily depending on CPU power.
It was frustrating to play for me. But over time i figured out a lot and thought i need to share it at least somewhere.

ALSO i want to make aware of a program called WinAFC which is, as far as i know, the only program that does that job for free!

Here are some tips for certain problems that you can try to fix your CS:GO and enjoy blaming your team instead of your hardware again =)

1. Micro stutters / High CPU load = deactivate cores

Info about the usual problem:

I tinkered aroud for ages and i found that CPUs have "micro stutters" because Windows+CSGO+Others can sometimes be too much.
Or more correctly: Everything is running at least on the first two cores/threads and CS:GO makes it even worse. Thats why we disable the first 2 threads for CS:GO so it wont fill up the main cores. Your system will stay stable and CS:GO as well.

How to Fix:

To disable the first 2 threads you need to open the Taskmanager (CTRL+Shift+ESC), go on Details (6th tab), find "csgo.exe and right click it, "set affinity" and UNCHECK CPU0 and CPU1.
After this right click again and "set priority".
Now this is something you need to test around a little.
I set it on high, but a while ago i had the best result with "low" (also known as "idle" for WinAFC later). People reported that old CPUs actually have better performance on low, but i suggest you just test around.
DONT SET IT ON REALTIME! You can try it, but usually no program should be executed in realtime.








NOTE: As soon as the game is closed, these settings RESET!
Test this fix first!

Setting priority through steam/launch options:

If setting the priority did the job alone then you also can set this in the CSGO launch option (library, right click cs, properties, input in "Launch option". For example: -high )

Automatically changing affinity and priority with WinAFC

If the affinity option, or both, helped or at least improved your performance i want to introduce the Program "WinAFC" to you!
(WinAFC ist the last topic in the Guide)

2. Disable raw input (read if you play 4:3 !!!)

I recently figured out that disabling raw mous input in the game settings (or " m_rawinput 0 " in console) not only made my fps more constant but also my maximum fps went up.

People said it also helped with stuttering when playing 4:3. This fixed it.
If it doesnt do anything for you put it back on, since it usually is better.
If you leave the setting off you most likely have to change your ingame mouse sensitivity.

3. Mouse hardware settings (polling rate)

Check your polling rate in a live view here: https://www.vsynctester.com/testing/mouse.html

A Problem with a lot of games is if the Mouse has a polling rate of 1000Mhz (like Apex Legends).
I forgot what the reason for it was, but for most brands out there you will have a software to configure your Mouse. There you will also (hopefully) have the option to change the polling rate something like 250, 500, 1000.

Try anything lower than 1000Mhz and see if it helps. It will have a different feeling when aiming tho.




























(Yes, I'm german.)

4. Steam Overlay

Disabling the Steam-Overlay can help getting rid of micro stuttering as well.

You wont have friendlist, messages or the browser. Basically your "shift+tab" is deactivated.
But if it helps, it helps.

Go to steam library, CSGO, right click -> properties -> uncheck "Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game"

5. Graphic settings

This is just a reminder that you also can change settings specifically for a program through the software from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.
For example "nvidia control panel".

These change from time to time about "whats best" and also from system to system.
I actually wont put any info here because for some reason my CSGO runs better when some settings are higher than lower or i just haven't figured out what the reason for that is.

You will have to play around with your in-game settings and search for other guides specificaly for that.

Like i said it changes from time to time and everyone has a different System. Sorry.
Might be disappointing, but my focus was to bring awareness to the other topics since we never read or hear anything about these issues and how to fix it.

Program WinAFC (automatically set affinity+priority of a program)

WinAFC Description[affinitychanger.sourceforge.net]
Download[sourceforge.net]
WinAFC will check if any program or game, that you told it about, is currently running and will set its affinity+priority automatically.
The program is from 2009 (or its latest update, idk) and i found a bug. I think the bug was if you use any other textfile than the default affinity file. So keep that in mind and dont play around to much with like 5 different files in 2 different folders.
(Or you had to have it in the same folder, i forgot. sry).
Also you need to set your path at the end of it. Just read the discription on the website for help.

Installation

Click on the download button, get the zip file, unzip it where ever you want it.
(you might have to give it admin permission or start as admin)
Start the exe and let it do its magic.
It first will detect your CPU and should look like this:
Here we also see the cores and pairs that we can choose in a second.
If you encounter an error while WinAFC starts, scroll down to "problems".

Configuration

Next step is to edit the affinityinput.txt file.
Right click on the WinAFC icon -> load Profile -> Open.
(This is two steps in one. If you only want to edit your file simply go into the folder of WinAFC)


That way we can choose the file we need OR in our case we edit it right here:


In the file we go all the way down to the last line where it says "Application Profile lines"



NOTE: if there is a " # " infront of a line it is not a command, it is a comment. Dont delete them, only add them if you want to deactivate a line.
Now here we have to tell WinAFC what program it should check and what settings we want.
Open the black console window of WinAFC to see how many cores it detected.
In my case:
Found 8 CPUs
CPU0 to CPU7
OR
Found 4 PAIRs:
Pair0 to Pair3

Example:

Since we want to get rid of the main cores which are CPU0 and CPU1 or just PAIR0, but the program can only include and not exclude CPUs, for CS:GO it would look something like this:

C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Counter-Strike Global Offensive := PAIR1+PAIR2+PAIR3 [priority=high]

It means:

1. path to csgo.exe, but you also can put C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\*, so it works for all games in the steam Library. Thats what " * " is for.
   
2. " := " this sign is important and it wont work without it. It devides the path from your settings.
   
3. Now you set what cores you want to USE. It goes from CPU0 to CPU7 in my case. Pair0 is CPU0+CPU1 (that we dont want). So thats why it shows only the other pairs.
   
4. " [priority=high] " The priority is the same as we did before BUT it goes form "idle" (which equals to low in windows) up to Realtime.
   (The options are: Unchanged | Idle | BelowNormal | Normal | AboveNormal | High | Realtime )

If you modified this, so that it fits your path to csgo.exe, save the text file and then, since we are still in the window to open the program, open this profile/textfile.
In case you closed the window or you just want to reload it rightlick on WinAFC in the taskbar (might be hidden in that little arrow thingy in the taskbar) and load profile.

Problems with WinAFC:

Sometimes it has some hiccups.
If you have yellow text saying something about the CPU, right click and "detect CPU" and then right click again, if it was successful, and "start winafc".

If it cant find any matching programs you either have an error in your Profile/text file or you simple have to reload the profile.

The WinAFC page is full of Description, tutorials and help if you need more information, but i think i already explained the main things about it. WinAFC Description[affinitychanger.sourceforge.net]

[cabiste]

actually one more thing, you can use "Process Lasso" instead of "WinAfc" which doesn't have the problems you mentioned with winAfc and it has a proper UI (unfortunately it's not open source) you can try it and maybe add it to your guide if you liked it?

[Coob]

@cabiste true, i mentioned it at the end of the first point, but WinAFC is mainly for setting the affinity and why not let it change priority as well.
If you dont want to change priority through WinAFC choose " [priority=Unchanged] "
But i will highlight this, so people see it better.
Thanks.

[cabiste]

you don't need to set the game's proiority to "high" in the task manager or even use AFC for it, the "-high" launch option already does that