b0t wrote:So it actually limits performance? People have used -high since the beginning of CS..
It doesn't limit performance. What it does is give a process higher scheduling priority at the expense of processes that might actually need it.
And its ssuper important to get to the bottom of this because obviously CSGO is a game that "squeezes" the CPU a lot more than it should.. Very poor optimization on Valve's side
Actually the reverse is true. If a game doesn't "squeeze" the CPU, it's not well optimized. When game doesn't max out the CPU, it means that game could run faster (since more CPU is available) but doesn't. If you don't use a setting that limits the maximum speed of a game (like enabling vsync or using a frame limiter), a game should either max out the CPU or the GPU (whichever is the bottleneck for a given game.) CS:GO does not use advanced graphics, so it's the CPU that should be maxed out.
Also, compared to other games, CS:GO is pretty good at it. I don't know of many modern games where I can get 200+FPS on my i5 2500K. It could be better, since it doesn't max out all cores, but it's not actually bad.
However, what isn't well optimized in the game is real-time asset loading. It's not able to load-in new textures for example without freezing. This is not an issue in matchmaking, but it is an issue in causal modes, where people joining the server result in huge frame time spikes.
So RealNC, how exactly does -high affect *badly* on the game? I would like u to simplify it for me
Since this is a game, it uses a lot of CPU, and that means you can run into situations where you get micro-freezes because another system process that also has high priority and that needed to do its job gets starved of CPU time. The system processes that Windows schedules with high priority by default usually need to run when they should in order to keep the system responsive. If you make CS:GO compete with them, you can make things worse, not better.
The higher the CPU usage or a process is, the less of a good idea it is to give it permanent high priority.
If you benchmark it, removing "-high" will not result in less FPS. Removing "-high" might actually reduce micro-freezes.
If you have other stuff running in the background that hogs the CPU (like encoding a video in Sony Vegas or whatever), then instead of making CS:GO run at high priority you should actually make Sony Vegas run at low priority.