Ashlock's Tut for smoother game-play.

Hello there, here is my tutorial on how to get your CS Source running alot smoother especially if you have an FPS problem

Start up Commands

First off I would like to direct your attention to the launch set up of your Counter Strike Source. In order to see this and modify it follow these steps:


1. First open the steam window and click games

2. now right click on counter strike source and then click properties

3. A window should pop up

4. From here click "Set Launch options"

5. A small window will come up it should be blank


Now let me explain, this command line you have in front of you allows you to impose any settings on CSS to execute on boot up, whether it be graphical settings etc.

What we want to do is make our CSS smoother so:

First we set the heapszie, this is crucial if you want your CSS to run as smoothly as possible. Now depending on the ammount of RAM there is in your system you will either set it to:

-heapsize 262144 for 512mb of RAM
-heapsize 524288 for 1024mb of RAM
-heapsize 1048576 for 2048mb of RAM

The units used for the heapsize are kilobytes (kb) 1024kb = 1mb

The ideal setting is half of your RAM without going over the top.
Note: I have tried going over the top and it makes very little difference.

Enter your desired heapsize into the launch options box and we will continue.

If you could grasp that then your off to a good start, the rest should be fairly easy for you.

Next we need to set an optimized directx level for our game to run on. The supoorted dx levels are:

-dxlevel 90 = Directx 9.0
-dxlevel 81 = Directx 8.1
-dxlevel 80 = Directx 8.0
-dxlevel 70 = Directx 7.0

Now I will explain what each of these will do to the game.

-dxlevel 90 This is the default for all directx 9.0 compatible cards, if yours is different please find out what dx level its supports otherwise you might end up with the wrong dx config skewing your CSS performance
this level has all of css's features, nothing taken away.

-dxlevel 81 A favourite of mine as it maintains a nice balance between graphics and performance, your models will have less poly's (lower quality) but you will still maintain all the eye candy features like bumapping. (If you have no idea what im talking about just look for things you understand)

-dxlevel 80 very similar to 81 but without the bumpmapping.. no point really unless you are really desperate, will improve smoothness a tad more than 81.

-dxlevel 70 Now this leaves all of the basic eye candy which makes css look decent but improves smoothness phenominally on my old comp I went from 20 - 30 fps to 60 - 100 /w a config not bad eh? I will include my fps config later, if you really need it.

Now select you desired dx level and input it the same way as you did with the heap size (make sure you leave gaps between commands)

Now for some simple commands that should help get as much juice from your computer as possible.

-nosync now this will turn of v_sync v_sync caps your fps to your refresh rate, but in the process usually messes things up, so I prefer to have it off.

-gl this will force open gl mode, recommended for Nvidia graphics cards.

-d3d this will force d3d mode, recommended for ATI cards

-refresh "screen refresh rate" This forces a certain screen refresh rate "the ammount of fps your screen can display" for example -refresh 75 for a 75hz compatible screen.

Note: make sure you know what refresh rates are compatible with your screen before forcing them doing so with an unsupported rate may be catastrophic.

the forcing of d3d is new to me, ill try it