Valve finally acknowledged CS2 lag, but what’s the fix?

CS2 players will finally have some clarity regarding the long-standing lag and network issues, because Valve has provided an uncharacteristically thorough explanation and a fix in new release notes.

Fans have been complaining about performance issues since Counter-Strike 2’s release in 2023. However, in the last three months, there was a surge in complaints as more players started to notice problems like rubber banding, delay, and lag. Players tried various ways to lower packet loss, but often the game would still lag even when there was no packet loss.

Valve has now explained why players missed shots due to lag and frame skipping. According to the developer, these issues should now be resolved.

CS2 lag explained, and fixed, by Valve

Valve has revealed that it took notice of CS2 players’ lag complaints even before the Amory update and tried to fix them by improving the game’s network quality indicator. Before the update, the indicator used to mark some harmless network issues as bad while missing other factors like jitter that actually caused lag.

In the Armory update on October 2, 2024, the game started marking packets as bad if they were lost, arrived out of order, or had too much jitter. The network quality indicator worsened for players with high jitter, leading many to think packet loss had increased even though it was just showing jitter as a problem.

All of these issues combined caused inconsistencies in CS2. Sometimes it worked smoothly and after an update the netcode would start acting up again. Now, Valve has updated it again to only show problems if they genuinely affect gameplay. This way, players only see network issues that truly impact their experience.

In the new update, Valve has made several improvements to network performance, including fixing lag compensation during sprays, improving clock sync to handle jitter, and updating network quality measurement to focus on gameplay impact. They also added an option to show detailed packet loss and jitter information in the telemetry HUD.

Only time will tell how the new update is different from past fixes and if it actually improves lag. But for now, it’s refreshing to see a detailed explanation from Valve and a fix that sounds promising.