It seems the solution now is uninstalling all gaming software that controls peripherals.
Valve's software developer Fletcher Dunn discovered on Monday, May 27 that ASUS Aura, a software used to control lightning in gaming peripherals, causes performance issues to CS2.
According to Dunn's findings, ASUS Aura (lightningservice.exe) is causing CS2 "to stall for 60ms randomly." The Valve developer shared his findings on X in the hope that an ASUS engineer will see it and fix the problem.
Since Valve released CS2 in 2023, many players have complained about getting random micro stutters while they're playing and now we know that programs like ASUS Aura can tank CS2's performance. These findings come less than a week after Valve released a major meta-changing update to CS2, which altered Vertigo's layout and tweaked the economy system to favor the CT side.
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Similar software also caused performance problems in CS2
While ASUS is in the spotlight right now due to Dunn's recent post on X, he actually found out in April that a CORSAIR software was stressing out the CPUs for "several hundred ms at a time."
So, perhaps it's better to uninstall any gaming software you have on your PC in case you have performance issues in CS2. These software are generally needed to install a peripheral, change settings, or control the backlighting.
The issue is that these sorts of programs run in the background and generally start up together with the operational system. Once your gaming peripherals are all set up and working as you want, you can uninstall them as the settings will remain.
Micro-stutters are just one of the performance problems in CS2 right now as the game keeps randomly crashing even at professional tournaments with the best PC parts available. But, Dunn's findings show that sometimes game developers are not the ones to blame at all. Sometimes, random software is the root cause for performance issues and it's not something that game developers can foresee.
