The Source Engine[en.wikipedia.org] is the graphical engine of CS:GO. This is not a GPU demanding game, but you can gain better visual quality or higher frame per second by adjusting the video settings.

In this guide i show you how to switch back and forth between the mentioned endpoints, and how to do that without a hustle.

This is how the ingame video settings interface looks like:

The main video settings are stored in a folder that is dedicarted to your steam account.

To locate your video settings, you need to know your 32bit steamID
- Open the steam application.
- Click on view and click again on settings
- Click on the interface tab.
- Make sure that the checkbox of Display Steam URL address bar when available. is not empty.
- Open the friends menu.
- Click on your avatar. The Steam application will go to your profile.
- Copy the line on the top left starting steamproxy.com/profiles/.
- Go to the webpage www.vacbanned.com.
- Insert the previously copied line into the search bar. Press Enter.
- Copy your Steam3 ID (32bit). It should look like: [U:1:xxxxXXXX]. xxxxXXXX is an 8 digit number.
- In your file browser go to ...\Steam\userdata\xxxxXXXX\730\local\cfg. (xxxxXXXX is the 8 digit number you figured out previously.)

There are two files in this folder that contain your main video settings.
video.txt is loaded every time you start the game. videodefaults.txt stores the default values of the main video settings. The content of videodefaults.txt is generated acoording to your PC's specs.

Tihis is how my videodefaults.txt looks like:
As good as i know VendorID and DeviceID are the numbers that represent your hardware.

These are the possible values and their meaning:

If you want to store an additional set of video settings, just:
- open video.txt
- adjust the txt file's content
- save it with a different name (for example: preset1.txt) in the same folder

To sawap video profiles quickly:
- renaming your existing video.txt to something else (for example: backup1.txt)
- renaming your preset1.txt to video.txt

An even faster way to do it is to delete[docs.microsoft.com], copy[docs.microsoft.com] and
rename[docs.microsoft.com] with a Windows Batch Spripts[en.wikibooks.org].

This is a way to set it up with Windows Batch Spripts:
- create a new folder at the location of video.txt
- rename the folder to my presets
- place your presets into the my presets folder
- name your presets as: preset1.txt and preset2.txt

Repeat the marked steps, but rename the new .txt file to set_preset2 and replace preset1 with preset2 within the text.

Once you run one of the set_preset.bat files, it will:
- delete the existing video.txt file
- copy the selected preset.txt to the folder where video.txt was
- rename the copied preset.txt to video.txt

You can move the set_preset.bat files to the desktop, or to the start menu where it's easy to access and run it.

Launch options can adjust many aspects of the Source Engine.[en.wikipedia.org] Some aspects can be adjusted only this way. It's well documented. Here are the most important links about it:
- the Steam Support page for Launch options
- the the Valve Developer Community page for Launch Optoins
- the most recenty added -noubershader command

The Valve Developer Community page lest you know a vrey important feature. You can have several different Launch option presets. Only thing you need to do is:
- create a shortcut of your Steam.exe file (the default install folder of it is: C:\Program Files\Steam\)
- right click on the shortcut, left click on propeties
- go to the Shortcut tab of the new window
- in the Target row insert -applaunch <AppID> (where <AppID> is a number associated with a steam game, it is 730 for CS:GO)

You can put any other Launch Option command after -applaunch <AppID>. The selected Source game will use those commands on startup.

This is how the Target row of the shortcut looks that starts CS:GO without intro video:

"C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam.exe" -applaunch 730 -novid

The NVIDIA GPU's driver install the NVIDIA Control Panel. It's a powerful tool to adjust video settings. To access it:
- right click over the empty space of the desktop
- left click on NVIDIA Control Panel

This is how the opening window looks:
I marked with red the part, that allows you to adjust global video settings for either high qualiry or high performance.

Under the Manage 3D settings tab you can adjust performance related options in detail. You can do it as a global (all aplication adjusting), or as a program specific setting.

The Manage 3D settings tab has many rows with many options. It takes some time to adjust it all. It's possible to do it quickly with a third party software called NVIDIA Profile Inspector[nvidiaprofileinspector.com]

If you start NVidiaProfileInspectorDmW.exe it will open this window:
I marked with red the most important parts of it:
- area 1 is where you can select a single program or the global driver profile option
- area 2 resets the single program or the global driver profile settings to NVIDIA defaults
- area 3 allows you to iport or export graphical settings
- area 4 applies the adjusted or iported graphical settings to the selected single program or to the global driver profile

This is how my HIGH video.txt preset looks like:


This is how my LOW video.txt preset looks like:

This is how my Steam.exe shortcut's Target row looks with Launch Options for HIGH video quality :
"C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam.exe" -applaunch 730 -high -threads 4 +mat_hdr_level 2

This is how my Steam.exe shortcut's Target row looks with Launch Options for LOW video quality :
"C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam.exe" -applaunch 730 -high -threads 4 +mat_hdr_level 0

This is how it looks when you use custom vide.txt presets paired with Windows Batch Spripts[en.wikibooks.org]

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1907127663
https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2065713418
https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2071748942

Give tihs guide a like if it was useful to you. It will help others to find this.

GLHF