CS GO: Understanding Radar Settings

Understanding the radar is one of the best way to know the whole scenario of the game. Every professional player is well aware of the locations where his teammates and enemies are by looking at the Radar, so radar is a one of the 10 best counter strike tips for improving gaming skills.

Why is Radar important?

• To know whole scenario of the map.
• See teammates with yellow dot.
• See enemies with red dot.
• See enemy's last position with a red question mark.
• See where bomber is or where bomb is dropped.
• Even see the level of the teammate or enemy, if there is opposite downward 'T' below the player's position means he is below your floor/surface and if its normal 'T' above the player's position means he is above your surface/floor.

Problem with Default Radar:

The default Radar shows a very small amount of whole map and player outside the small area in the radar are shown as a triangle.

Suppose you are at upper tunnel (UT) in de_dust2 and enemy is spotted at high mid then you'll the red triangle and you cannot guess whether he is at High mid or A-Long.

Set your Radar for Maximum use:

Open console and type "cl_radar_always_centered 0"

Now see the changes:

See how we are “wasting” half of the radar on black nothing. When not centered we are able to see more of the map.

Now type "cl_radar_scale 0.3"

This will scale the radar and you will see bigger amount of map in Radar.

cl_hud_radar_scale

When scaling the map down, we loose some of the details. To compensate for some of this, we can scale up the radar HUD.

Command:

cl_hud_radar_scale 1.15

As you can see, the radar HUD is now bigger. I find that 1.15 to be the sweet spot, where you can still see all information on screen.

cl_radar_icon_scale_min

This step is optional, but I use it myself. It makes the icons on the radar bigger, which I find useful.

Command:

cl_radar_icon_scale_min 1

Final Radar Tweakings

Now that we have tweaked our radar settings we have a much more useful radar, where the whole map is displayed at all time. Check this comparison between the default settings and our tweaked settings:

The only bad thing about the tweaked radar, is that the map is not very detailed, whereas when the scale is bigger, it is easier to see the map details. If you know the map well, this is not necessary though, at least in my opinion

cl_radar_rotate

If you don’t want the radar to rotate with you, you can turn off the radar rotation.

cl_radar_rotate 0 //off
cl_radar_rotate 1 //on - recommended