Destructive Incorporated

Counter-Strike: Source will suck your fps like crazy if you let it. Aside from the few gamers with dual-cores rigs and 7800's or better, tweaking for faster frame rates in CS:S is a MUST. Read on to see how I handle a modest average 100fps at 1680x1050 on a 3400+ with an x850 and moderately high settings (and good hit registration, of course).

Drivers are the first thing which should be taken care of. IMHO, DNA or Omega drivers work the best, and I have a slight preference towards DNA (although either will work very well). Just follow their instructions to ensure a clean install.

After your drivers are all set up and you've rebooted however many times windows wants you to, go into the launch options for CS:S (my games\cs:s\properties\launch options). Add the line: -dxlevel 81 . What this does is set what level of direct x the source engine will use for rendering. 81 is preferable over 70 because it 81 can draw full shadows, and I've seen slight speed increases (at least on ATI) with 81 over 80, and 90 is just plain slow unless you have a sweet-ass rig. If you'd like, go ahead and manually set the resolution you'd like cs:s to run at as well with something like: -width 1680 -height 1050 . Go ahead and press OK so we can change the autoexec.

The autoexec.cfg file is not normally created by default for cs:s. However, when you create one, it is a handy file that cs:s will reference every time it loads, which can help ensure that you don't have to keep typing in the same commands over and over. If you don't already have one, in windows go to steam\steamapps\user\counter-strike source\cstrike\cfg . An easy way to create a new .cfg file is to just copy the config.cfg file and rename it to autoexec.cfg . Go ahead and open up the autoexec, and if there's something already in it just go ahead and delete it all so you can start off with a clean slate.

Now, I like to play with high settings in cs:s. I don't like the way low resolution textures look, but I don't mind sacrificing "shiny" graphics for more stable fps. I want cs:s to look pretty good, and play well, with not too many trade-offs for performance. This is the basis for the options in my autoexec, which follows:

//graphics
mat_specular 0
mat_bumpmap 0
mat_reducefillrate 1
mat_antialias 1
mat_forceaniso 4
mat_force_bloom 0
mat_compressedtextures 1
mat_forcehardwaresync 1
mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 1
mat_parallaxmap 0
mat_hdr_enable 0
cl_showfps 1
fps_max 300
//network
cl_interp_all 1
cl_interpolate 1
cl_interp 0.01
rate 40000
cl_cmdrate 101
cl_updaterate 101
//game options and tweaks
cl_smooth 1
cl_smoothtime 0.1
cl_winddir 0
cl_windspeed 0
cl_ragdoll_collide 0
cl_ragdoll_physics_enable 0
cl_phys_props_enable 0
cl_phys_props_max 0
cl_forcepreload 1
func_break_max_pieces 0
r_DrawDetailProps 0
r_eyeglintlodpixels 0
r_eyegloss 0
r_eyemove 0
r_eyes 0
r_eyeshift_x 0
r_eyeshift_y 0
r_eyeshift_z 0
r_eyesize 0
r_fastzreject -1
r_modellodscale 0
r_propsmaxdist 1
r_transitionsensitivity 0
r_rootlod 1
rope_collide 0
rope_smooth 0
rope_wind_dist 1

Just go ahead and put all of these commands into your autoexec.cfg and click save. The 3 main commands that will boost fps by the most are mat_bumpmap 0, mat_specular 0, and mat_reducefillrate 1, all of which together will disable "shiny" graphics.

I also have a few aliases I use in addition to the above commands which I like to keep in my alias. Reason being that cs:s will sometimes forget these aliases if they are in the config only. One is so that I can press a key to make sure I have the max brightness on my relatively dark gateway 21". Another to change my crosshair size. And one more for shift to be my whip-out-the-pistol key (binding to slot2 will sometimes result with 2 becoming unbound). I also have one command to make the lighting really ugly, for when I'm in the mood.

//aliases and binds
alias bright1 "mat_monitorgamma 1.6"
alias bright2 "mat_monitorgamma 1.7"
bind - bright1
bind = bright2
bind mouse3 crosshairscale0
alias crosshairscale0 "cl_crosshairscale 400; bind mouse3 crosshairscale1"
alias crosshairscale1 "cl_crosshairscale 800; bind mouse3 crosshairscale2"
alias crosshairscale2 "cl_crosshairscale 1200; bind mouse3 crosshairscale3"
alias crosshairscale3 "cl_crosshairscale 2400; bind mouse3 crosshairscale4"
alias crosshairscale4 "cl_crosshairscale 4800; bind mouse3 crosshairscale5"
alias crosshairscale5 "cl_crosshairscale 10000; bind mouse3 crosshairscale0"
bind shift quickpistol
alias quickpistol "use weapon_deagle; use weapon_usp; use weapon_glock; use weapon_p228; use weapon_elite; use weapon_fiveseven"
bind ins shadowsmooth
alias shadowsmooth "r_avglightmap 0; bind ins shadowrough"
alias shadowrough "r_avglightmap 1; bind ins shadowsmooth"

That's it! If you even want to take it one step further, open up cs:s, hit the console, and type "revert all". The game will lag for about a minute and then will come back with default settings. As you might have guessed, revert will just revert all settings back to when you first installed, thus if you might have tweaked anything for the worse in the mean-time, you don't have to re-install to fix it. Don't worry, your autoexec will then configure all the proper commands when you load up again, although you may have to re-bind your keys.

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If you have any questions about any particular commands in the console, please post and I will do my best to explain what it means for you in-game.