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What Is The Best Monitor Resolution For Counter-Strike?
Playing with the wrong settings can degrade your aim and positioning in almost any game and especially in Counter strike. Most players adjust their mouse settings to their taste but forget one of the most neglected aspects of the game which is the resolution. The resolution can affect your field of view, how large your enemies hitboxes appear and even the perceived speed of yourself and your opponents. Today we will show you some of the most popular resolutions and explain their pros and cons.
1920X1080
The most popular resolution in CS:GO and in most other games is 1920×1080 as it is the native resolution of most modern monitors. You are probably playing CS:GO on this resolution too, and that’s a major Disadvantage! 1920×1080 does make everything look sharper, but it also makes everything a little harder to hit. 
Playing with a lower resolution and a lower aspect ratio (With stretched) makes enemies appear larger thus making them a little easier to hit. With that being said playing with a lower resolution will lower your field of view and make everything feel a little more focused on the middle of the screen.
Regardless of the minor disadvantages of playing with higher resolutions, we think you should only play with 1920×1080 if you don’t really care about performance that much and feel that a more beautiful game outweighs the benefits of better aim or if you are concerned about the larger field of view and don’t want to lose it.
Black bars vs Stretched
Black bars are used by a few pros with the vast majority using the stretched scaling mode. We believe stretched is the way to go because it helps you hit more shots and makes everything a little easier to see. However, some pros say that Black bars help their aim and help them envision their AWP scope better. We think that it’s a placebo effect and from our tests, playing on stretched mode will improve your performance more than playing with black bars will. We believe that most pros who play with black-bars are simply used to it from the 1.6 and source days and don’t bother to make the switch.
As you can clearly tell our personal winner is the “stretched” scaling mode.
1024 x 768
As we have mentioned before, the vast majority of pros use 1024×768 or 1280×960 with an aspect ratio of 4:3 using the “Stretched” scaling mode. You are welcome to check that for yourself and take a look at our CS:GO pros database.
Using the resolutions mentioned above will make hit boxes appear larger thus making them easier to hit. However, you will only gain that advantage when using the “stretched” scaling mode with a 4:3 aspect ratio. These settings are our personal CS:GO settings and what we recommend to everyone looking to go pro. Apart from the larger hit boxes the smaller resolution and reduced pixel count will make it easier for you to processes what’s going on the screen thus making you react faster to the game.
With that being said, the lower resolution and smaller field of view can also hinder your performance, In fact, we have seen some pro players miss their enemies completely on multiple occasions! The slight disadvantage of a lower field of view can be eliminated with proper map awareness and good cross-hair placement.
Another disadvantage of playing with these “pro” settings is: targets appear to move slightly faster and the action feels a little more fast paced. Most pros use these settings because that’s what they are used to from the 1.6 and source days. For that reason, we believe you should try both, the normal 1920×1080 settings and the “pro” settings for a few hours and choose for yourself!
