Counter-Strike 2 – 4:3 AMD Stretched to 16:9 No Lag Guide

AMD users face lags when using 4:3 stretched resolution, no matter FPS count, no matter frame time gen. This guide should fix this problem.

The Problem

Switching to CS2 and playing 4:3 stretched was a bad experience. Having 300+ frames, ~5-6ms frame gen times yet the game was laggy. It was worse when I suddenly turned around or something was happening off screen (smokes going off etc)

My GPU and CPU utilization was at moderate levels. There was no difference if I was running eco/performance modes in adrenalin.

Switching to 16:9 or 16:10 showed that these aspect ratios are doing fine so there is something wrong with AMD image scaler or just CS2 implementation (who knows).

Fixing Adrenalin Settings

First of all you must run custom settings for CS2.

Secondly go to Gaming->Display and enable GPU Scaling.

Go to Gaming->Games->CS2 and edit settings.

Graphics Settings

• Radeon Super Resolution -> Disabled
• Radeon Anti-Lag -> Disabled (this caused a lot of issues)
• Radeon Chill -> Disabled
• Radeon Image Sharpening -> Disabled
• Radeon Enganced Sync -> Disabled
• Wait for Vertical Refresh -> Off
• Anti-Aliasing -> App settings
• Anti Aliasing Method -> Multisampling (didn’t test it, seems to have no impact)
• Morphological AA -> Disabled
• Anisotropic Filtering -> Disabled
• Texture Filtering Quality -> Standard
• Surface Format Optimization -> Disabled
• Tesselation Mode -> App settings
• OpenGL Triple Buffering -> Disabled

Display settings

• AMD Free Sync -> Off (I dont have free sync display so couldnt test it)
• Scaling Mode -> Full panel (if you want to stretch it to entire display, if you want it to fit vertically use “preserve aspect ratio”)
• Integer scaling -> Disabled (this also causes a lot of issues)
• AMD Eyefinity -> Disabled

FPS_MAX cap

Also it seems that capping FPS to your display refresh rate fixes the issue. So if you need to use things like anti-lag/FSR/image scaling/RSR and you get lags when playing stretched try to cap your fps.

You can actually cap it a bit higher too. When running at 120fps with 60Hz display there is minor lag when doing sudden movements. The higher the fps difference from your refresh rate the worse it gets