PGL upgrades PCs for the EU RMRs
PGL announced this morning that tournament computers had been upgraded from the AMD 5950X to the 5800x3D and will be used for all future EU RMR games. The issue come up following an interview with HLTV, where 9Pandas rifler Denis "seized" Kostin said that it was, "really bad that we are playing a qualifier for the first CS2 Major on bad PCs," bringing concerns about the PCs at the RMR to the forefront in the community discourse.
In response to seized's comment and earlier comments from members of the community, PGL informed HLTV that the PCs were using AMD Ryzen Ryzen 9 5950X processors and Nvidia RTX 4080 16GB graphic cards, accompanied by 360hz Zowie monitors, seemingly refuting that the PCs are not sufficient for Counter-Strike 2.
However, while most of the components in the system seem to be fine, FaZe star Robin "ropz" Kool argued in a tweet of his own that the CPUs in the systems are not fit for the high performance professional players expect:
This CPU isn't good enough to run consistent 360 fps, even 240 fps. It's 3 years old, let's be honest here. ESL & BLAST have higher standards than this, so complaints are expected. Personal experience - I was using this CPU at home until CS2 released, it was clear that it wasn't enough to compete at the highest level.`
Sidenote is that the TO's are hopefully aware that they should have less cores for CS, for example the 14700k or the 7800x3d. Another minus of the 5950x is having too many cores and CS not utilizing it properly.
To provide context as to why PGL might be using these CPUs, the Complexity's VP of Talent and General Manager, Sören "Fantasy" Vendsahm elaborated that "companies buy a fleet and then let that fleet run event after event for 3+ years. So some events get lucky, some don't. But no game specific upgrades/downgrades/adjustments are made based on games and their demand."
While the specs seem to be sufficient, Valve also pushed updates in recent days which appeared to improve the FPS performance for many. The combined factors should assuage concerns from pros about the game.
