Conclusion

Counter-Strike 2 was released overnight. On Steam, the "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive" title was renamed to "Counter-Strike 2" and the new changes were pushed live. This means that CS:GO no longer exists—it has been fully replaced by CS2. CS:GO is still available as beta branch of CS2, so community projects can continue without major interruptions. This is a somewhat interesting move, but it's a smart one. The game's Steam Ratings, Top Seller status, Discussions and everything else will just carry over, without complex migration.

While traditionally, CS has focused on incremental iterative improvements, both in gameplay and graphics, CS2 makes a lot of changes, yet everything feels extremely familiar. Besides the changes in visuals and the UI, the core gameplay loop is identical. Gunplay is still awesome (if you know how to play CS), and it's terrible if you expect Call of Duty. I used to play a lot of CS around 2000, even competitively, and everything felt so familiar, yet much more beautiful.

Of course this doesn't mean that CS2 is able to compete visually with modern games launched in 2023. The Source 2 engine is simply too old for that. Check out the screenshots, no doubt it looks much better than Counter-Strike ever did, especially the shadows and ambient occlusion effects are great. Smoke grenades now look very believable and you can almost feel the smoke when approaching it—worrying if there's enemies behind or not. Still, at the end of the day these graphics look dated, there's no denying it.

Graphics isn't everything—gameplay matters more, at least to a big crowd of gamers. The good thing is that hardware requirements are extremely reasonable—one key piece why Counter-Strike has been such a success. Almost every computer in the world is able to run CS. While the hardware requirements have gone up with CS2, they are still extremely modest. I've tested 40 graphics cards and almost all of them are able to reach 60 FPS at 1080p Full HD using maximum settings. Only the GeForce GTX 1630 is below that mark, with 50 FPS. 60 FPS doesn't feel ideal in CS, you should rather go for something like 90 to have sufficient responsiveness. 1440p with 60 FPS is in reach for RX 6500 XT, GTX 1060, RTX 3050 and everything that's faster. Even 4K60 isn't too hard to achieve. RX 6600 XT, RX 5700 XT, RTX 3060 is what you need.

These FPS numbers are for the "Very High" settings profile. If you go to "Low," you can easily double or triple your FPS without a major loss in visual quality. Only the very weakest hardware won't be able to deliver a good gaming experience. Some people say that's one of Valve's goal with CS2: if you can't afford a basic computer, then you certainly can't afford their microtransactions either. VRAM requirements are very reasonable, too. You should have at least 4 GB VRAM, 6 GB or 8 GB is recommended for 4K.

Not sure why Valve doesn't recommend maximum settings with a RTX 4090. Generally the "recommended settings" algorithm isn't really optimal and it's better if you just experiment yourself. Besides the standard profiles, there's a good number of additional settings and the Internet is full of config tweaks for CS:GO, most of which can be used 1:1 in Counter-Strike 2.

Overall, Counter-Strike 2 feels a bit like a reskin of CS:GO, which isn't unreasonable. I'm not sure if it's ready for competitive prime time yet, but people will learn and adapt—these are professional athletes, so they should be able to deal with it. It will be interesting to see how the community reacts to Counter-Strike 2 and how much Valve is willing to change. Just yesterday 21649 reviews were submitted on Steam, of which 9991 were negative (or 46%). The title is free-to-play so check it out if Counter-Strike is your type of game.