Counter-Strike 2 – Enable Indoor Shadows on Low & Medium Setting

While running CS2 with global shadow quality set to low or medium, by default shadow casting is disabled. After following this guide, we will be playing on a fair playing field with players using high or very high settings.

We will not be changing outdoor shadows, so we maintain performance of the lower presets, only taxing the GPU in areas where typically less things are rendered anyway, and as such keeping our framerates as high as possible, without loosing crucial gameplay information.

Before editing, make sure to select your other desired video settings ingame, and close the application.

You’ll find the file we need to edit in the Steam userdata directory, by default located at:

Navigate to your unique userid folder and then proceed to

in there you’ll find a file called cs2_video.txt open this in your preferred texteditor.

Edit these lines with the numbers we have underlined here to the right:

“setting.lb_shadow_texture_width_override” “1536“

“setting.lb_shadow_texture_height_override” “1536“

“setting.lb_barnlight_shadowmap_scale” “0.750000“

“setting.lb_enable_shadow_casting” “1“

And save the file.

Additional note: The texture size can be incresed further to allow for a full shadowmap scale, these are just recommendations for a coherent experience ingame. Having a size of 2048 should allow for a shadowmap scale of 1.0 and 1280 should be enough for 0.5 for example.

You can make the cs2_video.txt read only to keep the changes through updates.

Just select cs2_video.txt and press alt + enter to bring up the properties dialog under attributes check “Read-only” and press OK.

Just remember Valve might update the file to a new version, at the time of writing this file is specified as version 12. If it changes you’ll have to remove this file and launch the game to recive the latest version, and make the changes to that new file yet again.