More FPS in CS:GO - Steam Overlay May be Causing Drops
As Reddit users have discovered, an overloaded Steam overlay may be causing fps drops in CS:GO. There are several solutions, including reducing your friends list.
- Reddit users tried to figure out the reason for fps drops in CS:GO depending on changing your Steam account;
- Proposed solutions included reducing the friend list and altering game files.
A high and stable frame rate is crucial for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players. It's probably the worst game among all the popular online FPSs to experience fps drops in. According to some Reddit users, the drops may be related to an overloaded Steam overlay.. In this case, it may be a long list of friends or the number of items in the Steam inventory (such as skins, stickers and other cosmetic items).
One player complained in the forums, that when playing on his main account, he experiences a significant fps drop in contrast to matches played on the so-called "smurf" or alt, which is an account with a much lower rank than the actual skills of the player. Such second accounts are used to play against lower-skilled friends without the risk of losing ELO/ranking points.
"I've been playing CS:GO on my second account and for some reason my FPS is smoother on my alt than on main. Both have the same settings. What's going on? Has anyone experienced something like this?"
One of the suggested solutions was to reduce the friends list to the same level as the other account. The experiment surprisingly worked, and the frame rate increased to an acceptable level. According to Esportnow [in Polish], another reason for the lowered fps may also be the large number of items in the Steam inventory; downloaded community maps are also said to slow players down. Removing the latter brings an improvement of up to 15%.
Another way to improve smoothnes was cited by user meXXerinho, who struggled with a similar problem on his main account. His solution requires digging into the game files and works as follows:
- Save your CS:GO launch options
- Save your own crosshair / viewmodel / radar and other necessary commands you use to autoexec.cfg and move it to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Counter-Strike Global Offensive\csgo\cfg"
- Copy all folders located in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata" to your desktop just for a backup
- Turn off Steam
- Delete all folders located in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata"
- Launch Steam
- Add your launch options
- Launch CS:GO
- Use your autoexec.cfg or manually set your old video and game settings
- Check your FPS and game smoothness while playing
- My fps didn't improve too much but now it's extremely smooth as if my 240hz turned into 360hz monitor.
NOTE:
After deleting all userdata folders, don't forget to optimize your Steam and CS:GO settings in the library.
In case if your FPS decreased after the fix, simply move your old folders back to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata"
Conclusion:
The stuttering can be caused by some files located in user data folders. I didn't get too deep into it to figure out what specific file/folders are causing the issue. According to the experience of other users, this fix should be applied pretty often."
There have been comments under this user's post confirming that the method works, so you can give it a shot.
