CS2 Launch Options in 2026: Six Work, the Rest Is Folklore

Every CS2 launch options guide looks the same: a wall of twenty commands, a promise of free frames, and a copy-paste line at the bottom.

Almost all of it is CS:GO folklore. CS2 runs on a different engine, and when Valve rebuilt the game they quietly dropped most of those commands. The guides never got updated, because nobody checked. They just copied each other.

Here is the version that was actually checked against the current build.

The complete list

Six options still do something. Ten do nothing at all. Two can hurt you.

The ones that work are mostly conveniences, not performance tweaks. -console saves you a trip into the settings menu. -fullscreen and -sw are useful once, to recover from a display setting that broke your game. +fps_max 0 removes the frame cap, which you could also just type into the console once.

-vulkan is the only genuinely interesting one. It switches the renderer from DirectX 11 to Vulkan, and on some hardware that changes frame pacing. Valve has published no numbers for it. It is worth trying on your own machine and worth removing if it looks worse.

That is the entire useful list.

Why “it gave me more FPS” keeps happening anyway

This is the best evidence anyone has published for any CS2 launch option: one tester, in January 2025, measuring -noreflex. Average FPS went from 248.4 to 250.7. That is 0.9 percent, which is smaller than the difference between two runs of the same benchmark on the same machine.

Nobody has replicated it. Nobody has published anything better for any other option.

So why does everyone swear their frames went up? Because you restart the game to apply a launch option. A fresh process, cleared shader cache, and whatever Chrome had been eating is gone. The restart did it. The command came along for the ride.

The ones people are most attached to

-tickrate 128 is the big one. It did something in CS:GO. In CS2 the server runs at 64 tick with sub-tick timing, and a client launch option cannot change a server’s tick rate anyway. Valve’s own announcement in March 2023 put it plainly: tick rate no longer matters for moving, shooting, or throwing.

-novid skipped the intro video. There is no intro video.

-threads 4 told the old engine how many CPU threads to use. CS2 handles its own threading, and telling it otherwise is at best ignored.

-high does genuinely set the process priority higher at the operating system level. Whether that produces frames is a separate question, and the honest answer is that nobody has shown it does. If CS2 is the only demanding thing running, there is nothing for it to win priority against.

+cl_interp 0.031 is the saddest one. Players entered it for years believing it fixed lag spikes and input delay. In September 2026 Valve deleted the command outright, and the reason given was that it never had an effect in CS2 in the first place.

The two that can actually hurt you

-insecure turns VAC off. The game’s own warning tells you that you will not be able to play competitive, because you cannot join VAC secured servers. People add it to run a mod and then forget it is there.

-untrusted is a leftover from the trusted mode rollout. Valve’s post about it in July 2020 warned that your Trust score may be negatively affected. Trust score influences who you get matched with, and it is not something you want to gamble.

Neither of these is going to appear by accident, but both show up in old copy-paste lines.

What to actually put in the box

That is it. Three options, and two of them are conveniences.

If you want to try -vulkan, add it, play two sessions, and judge by whether the game feels smoother rather than by the frame counter. If it looks the same, take it out.

So where do frames actually come from

Not from this box. If your FPS is genuinely low, the things that move it are your in game video settings, your resolution, your drivers and your hardware, in roughly that order. The settings guide covers which video settings matter, including the one that is not about FPS at all and is worth turning on anyway.

And if the reason you are reading a launch options guide is that something feels off in your aim rather than in your frames, that is usually sensitivity or crosshair, not a Steam text box.

Frequently asked

What are the best CS2 launch options? -console -fullscreen +fps_max 0. Optionally -vulkan if it feels better on your machine.

Does -high increase FPS in CS2? It raises the process priority, but no published test shows it producing more frames. On a machine running only the game there is nothing to prioritise over.

Does -tickrate 128 work in CS2? No. CS2 uses sub-tick timing, and a client option cannot set a server’s tick rate.

Why did my FPS go up after adding a launch option? Most likely the restart, not the option.

Are launch options bannable? The normal ones, no. -insecure disables VAC and blocks competitive, and -untrusted can affect your Trust score.

Do I need an autoexec? Probably not. CS2 loads settings itself and persists console changes between sessions.

The option behaviour in this article was checked against CS2 build 1.41.9.0 from October 2026, cross referenced between two independent testing write ups that agree on every item in the dead list. The Valve statements quoted are from Valve’s own announcements and release notes. Where the only evidence is a single unreplicated benchmark, this article says so rather than rounding it up into a recommendation.