Counter-Strike: Global Offensive engine branch
The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive engine branch was introduced in 2012 with the release of
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It is the latest Source 1 engine branch available and succeeds the
Portal 2 engine branch.
It is also no longer being updated with the release of Counter-Strike 2, but remains maintained for third-party games that use CS:GO branch.




Features
New since the Portal 2 engine branch is:
- FXAA anti-aliasing
- Simple at the cost of image quality, but are much faster than other anti-aliasing method, such as MSAA.
- FXAA can be also used with MSAA (such as 2X) at the same time. This will benefits most lower-end PC that struggles to run MSAA 4X or higher.
- Real-time dynamic shadows
env_cascade_light
provides dynamic, high-resolution cascade shadow mapping for the outdoor light oflight_environment
.- Lightmapped Ambient Occlusion
- VRAD can now bake ambient occlusion into the lightmaps for a map, leading to enhanced realism.
- Bump mapped decals
LightmappedGeneric
decals now support bump maps.
Newer Features
- Phong reflections on Lightmapped materials
LightmappedGeneric
andWorldVertexTransition
now support diffuse Phong reflections.- Vertex lighting for bumpmapped static props
- Static props with bump maps can now receive vertex lighting, better blending them into the environment. All static props also now receive better lighting.
- Anisotropic reflection emulation
- Brush shaders can now emulate anisotropic specular reflections using new parameters.
- Bump map blending for
LightmappedGeneric
- Two bump maps can now be blended together for high-frequency and low-frequency bumpmap variation on the
LightmappedGeneric
shader. Lightmapped_4WayBlend
- A displacement shader that can blend four different materials together by luminance.
- Prop combination
- VBSP now supports combining selected static props during map compilation, increasing performance and lowering draw calls.
- Increased engine and compilier limits
- The engine now supports more entities, more models and more displacements.
Note:Document all of the increased limits.
- New first-person weapon lighting.
- First-person weapon view now support more detailed lighting.
- Static prop scaling
- Other improvements
Todo: Document these, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Todo: Celisej: soon add more.
Availability
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (delisted)
Insurgency (earlier version)
Day of Infamy (earlier version)
Half-Life 2: Remastered (unreleased)
Confirm: While this game is currently unreleased, and not announced yet, it's most likely based off CS:GO branch heavily modified (according to SteamDB when viewing the Review_Build depot files) to include support for HL2 entities as it's contain some graphic features that can be only found in L4D engine branch and later (EKV files, replacing the old DirectX Versions system), Panorama/Qt UI, more...
A third-party, heavily modified version of this engine, called Strata Source, is also available, and it is used on the following games:
Source code for these branches is not available. However, authoring tools exist for custom content.