Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is currently the most-played game on Valve"s Steam service, with over 1.4 million gamers currently online at once. That"s due in part to Valve announcing Counter-Strike 2 in March, which will be a free graphical and gameplay upgrade for CS:GO. It"s likely that CS:2 will break concurrent player records when it officially launches later this summer.
Today, The Verge reports that Valve is working with NVIDIA to bring its Reflex technology to Counter-Strike 2. NVIDIA Reflex uses the company"s GPUs to cut down the latency in online games so players will see their actions on a mouse and keyboard reflected in the game as quickly as possible.
According to NVIDIA, turning on Reflex should cut down on latency by a fairly big amount in Counter-Strike 2. It will be felt by players who have older NVIDIA graphics cards the most. If you have a GTX 1060 card, the latency in Counter-Strike 2 will go down from 26 ms to 17 ms with Reflex on. If you have a more recent card, there will still be latency reductions while playing the game but they won"t be quite as much.
Counter-Strike 2 uses Valve"s Source 2 game engine and will include lots of graphical improvements to the game"s maps, visual effects, and more. The game"s servers will also be improved so it will know when a player moves, fires or throws a grenade in the game instantly. Valve is currently in private and invite-only testing for the game.