People who’ve been in the scene for a while know this: high refresh rates are the name of the game for competitive shooter games. In fact, not a single professional player is using a regular 60Hz monitor. That’s not a surprise at all: gaming at high refresh rates gives you a myriad of advantages.

The first (and most obvious) one is the fact that everything in the game just flows a lot smoother: being able to smoothly track how your enemies are moving can mean the difference between a missed shot and a hit shot, and we all know how important hitting your shots is in a game such as CS:GO.

It doesn’t end there, however. Even if you don’t have a 240Hz monitor (which is something that we thoroughly recommend for this game; check out our monitor guide for more info on the subject) there are advantages to reaching the highest framerates possible, which is why you see pro players do everything to max out the amount of frames that they’re getting even though their PC is already pushing way above 240 frames each second.

There’s the input latency, for example. If you’re pushing around 60 frames per second the input latency will be between 55 and 75 milliseconds, at 240 frames per second it goes down to values between 20 and 35 milliseconds. So if you were ever wondering why pro players sometimes seem to go crazy when their game drops to ‘just’ 250 frames per second instead of the usual 300+ you now know why.

Luckily CS:GO is a very easy game to run so you don’t need the absolute best GPU out there in order to reach at least 240 frames per second (which we consider to be the competitive minimum) so you can technically get away with a more budget-oriented GPU such as the RTX 2060 Super, which is one of our favorite graphics cards at this point in time. If you want to learn more about the subject you can always check out our full GPU guide for the game.

Of course it’s also important to note that your GPU (or ‘graphics card’) isn’t the only factor in reaching these framerates. Always make sure to have a balanced system. It makes no sense to have a state of the art 240Hz monitor coupled with a 2080 Ti if you’re just going to be running it through a 10 year old processor and 8GB of RAM. In any case, though: given that over 90% of professionals are on 240Hz systems we consider that the competitive standard.