Please note that this guide is currently outdated, some options might not work anymore and might not help as much


Commonly asked question: WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT MY FPS?????
Well, the higher your fps is, the easier the game gets. No choppy gameplay, no frame skipping so the guy magically appears in front of you, easier recoil control....

So yes, you should care about it.


First of all, you want to make sure you don't have a lot of applications running in the background.
To check, you can look at your taskbar:


Now close anything that's open except steam and your game
Once that's done, you might wanna have a look in your tray area:



And once again, close stuff such as other game clients, unwanted apps and such, however DO NOT close the antivirus, hardware related apps (such as the nvidia contol panel and the realtek panel) and steam.

Now, you should be ready to move on to in-game settings.

This is probably the most important part of this guide
Start up your game and open the console by pressing the ~ key
If this doesn't work, go to Options, then Game settings and set Enable developer console to YES
Now press the ~ again and type in "cl_showfps 1" without the ""
This will tell you how much FPS you get, which is basically how smooth your game runs
If the text is red (under 25) , then you should definitely continue with this guide and do as much as you can to get it to yellow or green
If it is yellow (25-50) , then you should also check out this guide
If it is green (50+), but not stable, then keep reading
If it is green and it's above 80, then you really don't have to be here unless you want:
a)an even smoother game
b)to play on 128 tick servers

Let's continue

Open Options, then Video settings, then advanced
Most people just leave them default even if their PC's aren't made to run the game at max settings
So let's explain what each setting does:
Global shadow quality- sets the quality of the shadows in-game, the lower it is, shadows will look jagged and low quality. You don't really look at shadows that much so setting this to low or very low should work
Model/texture detail- this sets the quality of the models and materials in-game, the lower it is, models will be less smooth, and textures won't be as clear. Play around with this and see at what point this stops giving you performance boosts
Effect detail- this sets the quality of visual effects in-game. I've set it to low because I haven't really noticed much difference on medium or high
Shader detail- this sets the lighting and various effects such as reflectivness of materials. I've set it to high because I like my guns shiny
Multicore rendering- this tells the game to make use of multiple CPUs in your machine, however some people report that setting this to Enabled will crash your game , so see what works best for you
MSAA, Texture filtering mode and FXAA Anti-Aliasing are all used to improve image quality and get rid of the jagged edges and make them smooth. This is a performance killer on older machines, so I would say to set it to None/Trilinear and see how that works for you
Wait for Vertical Sync- this limits your framerate (FPS) and most people set it to disabled because it really isn't needed, however if you're getting a small framerate, try enabling it and it might make it smoother for you
Motion blur- applies motion blur while rapidly moving and looking around. Disabled because I get motion sick and it also impacts performance slightly

You can also try dropping the resolution, since that always works, but makes your game blurry

These are in-game commands that will improve your framerate, but you cannot set them in-game using the options menu
You drop these in your C:/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/common/Counter-Strike Global Offensive/csgo/cfg folder
Link for the config[pastebin.com]
No viruses, just a text document there
Please note that if you already have a config for something else, you might want to merge it with this one using any text editor

Nvidia cards: Open your nvidia control panel

Then go to 3D settings then manage 3D settings and then set it the way I did in the pictures

For Intel

For Ati


Now for these, it's a bit complicated
First, locate to the 3d settings menu (picture 2)
Then click on the add button and find your game .exe (X:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Counter-Strike Global Offensive\csgo.exe X is the drive letter)
Set Texture filtering quality to Performance
Wait for vertical refresh to Off

and then try your game, it should work a bit better!

Launch options are the next thing to do then
To set launch options, open your steam library, then find CS:GO
Right click on it, Properties and then set launch options
Add this in:
-high -dxlevel 81 -nod3d9ex



If you're still having low FPS, there's really not much you can do,either get comfortable with the FPS you're getting or get an upgrade or overclock (at your own risk)