I have been testing out my NovaCustom laptop for doing things such as coding, software development, Counter-Strike trading and just a daily driver. Today I decided I would attempt running Counter-Strike 2 I am writing this on February 29th of 2024 so if in the future there have been any patches or fixes I am not aware of forgive me.

The first thing I found somewhat annoying was the fact it took ages for the Vulkan shaders to be finished during the first launch. After the first launch, I tried to move things into Windowed mode, so I could better see the temp readouts from Xubuntu.

I read a blog post from Solène Rapenne at his site dataswamp.org from January 2024 where he also talked about using the NovaCustom NV41 where he ran Counter-Strike 2 at 1600×900 and was able to get 60 FPS at minimum settings.

After I was finally able to enter the game, the choice came where I would test things out using a few bot players before going online. I was able to move everything to the lowest settings and the game after a few rounds of testing the CPU only got to 71 degrees Celsius at it’s peak but normally around 65 degrees most of the time and the CPU fan was quite as a mouse.

The FPS was around 45 to 50 which is playable for someone like me who isn’t looking to play in anything serious, mostly just casual games to get some drops to trade after the fact.

I believe the main deference between myself and Solène’s setups is the fact I have 32gb of ram and an i5 while he’s using 64gb of ram and an i7. Hopefully valve will update the game to function far better on mid-range setups or just write a far better Linux client in general.

I’d say in the end, this test was a win for my use case; casual matches and some mild Counter-Strike unboxing/trading.