Best Settings for Competitive Shooters (CS2, Valorant, Apex, Fortnite)
Pro settings lists tell you what someone uses, not why. Here's which settings affect your ability to see and hit things, and which are personal preference dressed up as advice.
The short answer
Across every competitive shooter, four settings genuinely affect performance: a frame rate high and stable enough to keep input latency low, shadows and effects turned down so enemies are not obscured, a field of view wide enough to see flanks without shrinking targets too far, and raw input enabled so mouse movement bypasses Windows acceleration. Everything else — including most of what appears in pro settings lists — is preference or hardware-specific.
Verified and last updated August 12, 2026.
- Time needed
- 18 min
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Read time
- 6 min
Search for the best settings for any competitive shooter and you get a list of what some professional uses. It is popular content because it is easy to make, and it is close to useless as advice, because it tells you the answer without the question.
The useful version separates settings into three groups: ones that measurably change your ability to see and hit things, ones that only affect frame rate, and ones that are personal preference presented as strategy.
Order of operations
Frame rate first, visibility second, input handling third, everything else last. A stable 200 FPS with default visuals beats a beautifully tuned 90 FPS in every competitive context, because frame rate is also latency — every frame you are not rendering is time before your input appears on screen.
The four settings that actually matter
1. Frame rate — because frame rate is latency
This is not primarily about smoothness. Each frame is roughly the minimum delay between you moving your mouse and seeing the result.
At 60 FPS you are waiting up to 16.7 ms for your input to appear. At 240 FPS, 4.2 ms. Stack that on top of network latency, peripheral polling and display processing, and the differences compound into something you feel.
Practically: cut whatever settings you need to hold a stable frame rate above your monitor's refresh, then cap it 3–5 FPS below refresh to stay inside the adaptive sync window. A stable 141 on a 144Hz panel feels better than a fluctuating 200.
2. Visibility — turn down what hides people
The settings worth cutting are the ones that put visual noise between you and an enemy:
- Shadows: low, not off. Low is faster and keeps enemy shadow information, which is genuinely useful positional data in CS2 and Apex.
- Effects and particles: low. Smoke, muzzle flash and ability effects are the main things obscuring targets during a fight.
- Foliage and details: low. In battle royales this is close to a competitive necessity — high foliage settings hide prone players.
- Ambient occlusion: off. Darkens corners and crevices, which is exactly where people hide.
- Anti-aliasing: keep some. This is the exception to cutting everything. Without AA, distant enemies shimmer and break up against a background, which makes them harder to track. TAA or the game's cheapest option is fine.
- Textures: high, if you have VRAM. Almost free in frame rate terms once loaded, and higher textures make player models more distinct against terrain.
3. Input handling — raw input, and Reflex
Raw input: on. This takes mouse data directly from the device and bypasses Windows pointer processing, including acceleration. Without it, the same physical movement can produce different in-game results depending on speed. Every competitive game offers it; some do not enable it by default.
Alongside it, in Windows: Enhance pointer precision off in Mouse settings. That is Windows acceleration and it fights your muscle memory constantly.
NVIDIA Reflex: on. Reduces the render queue and cuts input latency measurably when GPU-bound. Costs almost nothing. On the 240Hz test setup I measured a consistent reduction of around 18 ms in Apex when GPU-limited.
V-Sync: off, with adaptive sync on and a frame cap below refresh. Traditional V-Sync adds a full frame of latency or more.
4. Field of view — pick one and stop
Higher FOV shows more around you. It also makes everything smaller, which makes distant targets harder to hit, and it distorts the screen edges.
Between 95 and 110 covers where almost everyone lands. The specific number matters far less than consistency: every time you change FOV, your sense of how big a target should be at a given distance resets, and it takes days to recalibrate.
Pick 103, leave it alone for a fortnight, and only then adjust.
Per-game specifics
What is preference, not advice
Several things regularly appear in settings guides that have no competitive dimension at all:
- Crosshair colour and style. Whatever is visible against the maps you play. Cyan and magenta stand out in most environments; green disappears in foliage-heavy games. This is the extent of it.
- Sensitivity. Covered properly in the sensitivity guide, but briefly: there is no correct number, and copying a professional's is actively counterproductive.
- DPI. Any value between 400 and 1600 is fine on a modern sensor. What matters is your effective DPI — the combination of DPI and in-game sensitivity. The old wisdom that 400 DPI is inherently better dates from sensors that genuinely degraded at higher settings, which is not true of anything made in the last decade.
- Monitor refresh above 240Hz. Real but heavily diminishing, and only if you sustain the frame rate.
Aim assist, briefly
For controller players in cross-platform games, aim assist settings are genuinely consequential and rarely explained.
Aim assist typically has two components: slowdown (the reticle decelerates over a target) and rotation (the reticle drifts toward a target as you move). Games expose these differently, and the useful general principle is that aim assist works on your stick input — it needs you to be moving the stick to engage.
This is why standing still and expecting the reticle to snap does not work, and why small continuous stick movement while tracking produces noticeably better results than discrete corrections. It is the single most useful thing to know about playing on a controller against mouse players.
What works
What doesn't
Key takeaways
Frequently asked questions
Should I just copy a pro's settings?
Copy their video settings, not their sensitivity or their FOV. Video settings are largely about maximising visibility and frame rate, and those goals are the same for everyone. Sensitivity is calibrated to a specific person's grip, desk space and muscle memory — copying it means adopting a stranger's motor patterns. FOV is similarly personal, and it interacts with how far you sit from the monitor.
Is NVIDIA Reflex worth turning on?
Yes, essentially always, and it is one of the few free wins in this whole area. Reflex reduces the render queue so frames are not sitting waiting to be displayed, which cuts input latency by a genuinely measurable amount — commonly 10 to 30 ms when GPU-bound. It costs a few frames per second at most. If your card supports it and the game offers it, turn it on. Reflex plus Boost adds a little more at a slightly higher performance cost.
Fullscreen or borderless?
Exclusive fullscreen for competitive play, borderless for convenience. Exclusive fullscreen gives the game direct control of the display output, which removes a compositing step and reduces latency by a small but real margin. Borderless makes alt-tabbing instant and is more comfortable on multi-monitor setups. Windows has narrowed the gap considerably with optimisations for borderless, but exclusive fullscreen is still marginally ahead where it is offered.
Does turning shadows off give me an advantage?
Two advantages and one cost, and it is worth understanding all three. Lower shadows improve frame rate, and they stop enemies being obscured in dark areas — both real benefits. The cost is that you lose enemy shadow information, which in some games reveals players around corners before you see the player. In CS2 specifically, shadows carry meaningful positional information, so low rather than off is the usual competitive choice.
What FOV should I actually use?
Higher FOV shows more of your surroundings but makes distant targets smaller and increases distortion at the screen edges. Most competitive players land between 95 and 110 in games that allow adjustment. Start at 103, play for a week, and adjust from there — the important part is that you stop changing it, because your target-size intuition recalibrates every time you do.
About the author
Competitive & Settings Editor
Dan played CS:GO semi-professionally in a regional ESEA Main roster between 2017 and 2020, and has hit Radiant in VALORANT in three separate acts. He now spends most of his competitive energy on the unglamorous side of the game: input latency, sensitivity consistency and warm-up routines that actually transfer.
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