How to Play CS:GO in Stretched Resolution

In CS:GO, players will do just about anything that could give them a competitive edge. This includes memorizing the spray patterns of weapons, lineups for grenades of all kinds, and ideal positioning for certain engagements. One thing some players use is stretched resolution, which has some added benefits for competitiveness. Here’s how to play CS:GO in a stretched resolution!

How to Get a Stretched Resolution in CS:GO

First things first, you’ll need to change some screen scaling settings within your graphics card’s control panel. The method of doing this will depend on whether you’re team green (Nvidia) or team red (AMD), but what you’re looking for is desktop scaling options. Here, you’ll want to change your scaling to be full-screen rather than the default aspect ratio, and if possible, perform the scaling on the GPU. Once you’ve found those settings and changed them, the process is much simpler. Keep in mind that these settings will affect all games, so be ready to constantly swap if you don’t want it elsewhere.

Open up CS:GO and head over to the Video settings. From here, set your game to Fullscreen if it isn’t already, then change the aspect ratio to 4:3 and the resolution to be as high as possible. With all of these settings in place, your game should look stretched and thus should achieve the effect you desire.

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A stretched resolution has heavy downsides as far as image quality goes, but many professional players use this aspect ratio for several reasons. For one, enemies appear much larger on the screen than they do under normal settings. With some adjustments to the sensitivity, this could heavily improve your ability to aim. This also takes much less processing power off your system, allowing for higher framerates which is always a plus.