Improve CSGO FPS Using NVIDIA Control Panel & Inspector

The tweaks I am about to describe may not offer you the same benefit as it did for me as everyone’s GPU and general setup is different. However, it is definitely worth trying, as it could mean the difference between winning or losing a game. This improved my Counter Strike Global Offensive performance substantially and I recommend that you try it if you are looking to improve your framerate.

Note that this will only apply if you are using a NVIDIA card.

1. Open NVIDIA Control Panel (right click desktop -> NVIDIA Control Panel) and press ‘Desktop‘ on the menu bar and click ‘Enable developer settings‘
2. Click ‘Adjust image settings with preview‘ and select the checkbox labelled ‘Use the advanced 3D image settings‘
3. Go to ‘Manage 3D settings‘ and click ‘Program Settings‘
4. Click ‘Add‘ and then ‘Browse‘ in the bottom right and navigate to C:\Windows and select ‘explorer.exe‘
5. Within ‘Manage 3D Settings‘, scroll down and change ‘Power management mode‘ to ‘Prefer maximum performance‘
6. Repeat step 4 but navigate to C:\Windows\system32 and select ‘dwm.exe‘
7. Repeat step 5 and press ‘Apply‘ in the bottom right and close the control panel
8. Download NVIDIA Inspector (on that page, click the latest version, download the zip file and extract it somewhere – I usually extract it to a folder in my Downloads folder)
9. Open NVIDIA Profile Inspector (the .exe you just extracted – you may need to run as admin)

You will then need to change a few settings within Inspector. I suggest only changing the ones I detail below or any that you feel confident about changing to prevent any issues. These are the settings you should adjust:

1. Under ‘2 – Sync and Refresh‘ change ‘Maximum pre-rendered frames‘ to ‘1‘
2. Under ‘2 – Sync and Refresh‘ change ‘Prefered Refreshrate‘ to ‘Highest Available‘
3. Under ‘2 – Sync and Refresh‘ change ‘Vertical Sync‘ to ‘Force off‘
4. Under ‘3 – Antialiasing‘ change ‘NVIDIA Predefined FXAA Usage‘ to ‘Disallowed‘
5. Under ‘5 – Common‘ change ‘CUDA – Force P2 State‘ to ‘Off‘
6. Under ‘5 – Common‘ change ‘Power management mode‘ to ‘Prefer maximum performance‘
7. Under ‘Other‘ change ‘Memory Allocation Policy‘ to ‘WKS_MEMORY_ALLOCATION_POLICY_MODERATE_PRE_ALL‘

You can then press ‘Apply changes‘ in the top right corner and you should see a noticeable difference on CSGO.