CSGO has seen a lot of love from Valve recently, and with the upcoming release of their primary rival VALORANT, this trend is sure to continue for a while. The last CSGO update saw Valve fixing grenade inconsistencies in their competitive shooter, and this time they further emphasized on fixing grenades while simultaneously improving rendering for textures for better performance.
The first and most notable change for this update is, however, the newest addition to the killfeed family. The killfeed will now display kills done by the C4 in every game mode. This is certain to be a welcome change in the community since previously, players would have to keep checking the scoreboard to decipher who, if anyone, got killed by the C4 at the end of a round.
GAMEPLAY
- The killfeed now displays players that are killed by C4 explosions in all game modes.
- Players that are frozen by game logic no longer take damage.
- Players are less likely to become stuck on mid-air grenades, and are now able to stand up when crouched on top of another player’s decoy grenade.
- Grenades are less likely to phase through doors when thrown into nearby players, and have improved collision when bouncing near the ground around player’s feet.
RENDERING
- Adjusted sticker shader to reduce mip artifacts on holographic stickers at an angle.
- Optimized shadow culling frustum to prevent flickering shadows caused by renderable overflow at ultra-wide aspect ratios such as 21:9.
- Optimized texture generation by giving composite textures destined for models that are already rendering higher priority in the generation queue.
- Added a trailing cache of composite inputs, designed to optimize composite generation for sequences of similar jobs.
- More asynchronous texture requests are allowed per cycle, allowing composites to generate faster on some systems.
- Added an experimental graphics setting; ‘Texture Streaming’ in video options. Texture streaming allows the game to defer loading of high-resolution textures until they are needed for rendering, potentially saving a significant amount of video memory. On systems with slower disk access, streaming textures may be momentarily visible.
UI / LOCALIZATION
- Added a new Anubis main menu background movie to the game.
- Added a way for users to change their main menu background scenery.
- Split stickers and patches localization UI tokens to allow for better translations.
- Added proper HTML-escaping for custom inventory item names when applying and scraping stickers.
STORE
- Added Warhammer 40,000 Sticker Capsule featuring a variety of stickers from the Warhammer 40,000 series
STEAM
- Updated Steamworks SDK and Steam libraries to the latest versions released in May 2020.
- If the game fails to connect with local Steam Client, then users must update their version of Steam Client by selecting Steam > Check for Steam Client Updates…
The latest grenade fixes include that players will now be less likely to be stopped by mid-air grenades. They’ll also be able to now stand up when crouching on another player’s decoy grenade. The collision of grenades has also been improved, and are less likely to phase through objects when thrown to nearby players.
Next, the update focused on improving rendering in the game, consequently improving performance. Besides sticker shaders and texture generation being optimized, Valve has also made some other miscellaneous changes to improve rendering which can be found in details on their official blog. The most noticeable change is the addition of the new ‘Texture Streaming’ mode to the video settings of CSGO. This mode will enable players to defer loading of high-resolution textures until they’re needed for rendering, which can save video memory and improve performance on slower PCs.
Besides these, other small changes include the addition of a new ‘Warhammer 40000’ sticker capsule, a new Anubis main menu background, and enabled players to change the backgrounds in their main menus.
