You can definitely get good with the shittiest gear. But if you get a nice comp that runs the game at 120fps constant, a good mouse and keyboard, you will most likely notice a difference, and your game will most likely improve.

So long as you get a constant 60+fps, you should be fine. There is a huge improvement if you go to say, 120Hz though. Keyboard/mice don't matter so long as you can get comfortable with it. The only exception is if you have a buggy mouse that can't handle fast movements (I've had some terrible Dell mice that did this). But a $10 microsoft mouse is good enough to play the game.

If you spike from 30-90fps, you're going to do much worse than you can do. At least that's my experience with my 2.2GHz athlon 64. Once my fps stabilized above 90fps, game felt fine. I've had a 75hz monitor for a long time though, which is much better than 60Hz imo.

Biggest change I saw, hardware-wise, was going to a 120hz. monitor. Immediately got better at tracking and landing shots as a scout. Rarely played scout before getting that monitor. Not sure if it's placebo effect or not.

As a side effect, my level of bitching about ping, server fps, registration, etc went up about a billion %.

i'd say better hardware enables you to get better faster, but it won't necessarily push the ceiling on how good of a player you can become

this is what I play with

Alright, thanks guys. Don't have a clue what Lange is talking about, but thanks.

play a shit old compaq laptop for a few years, then move on to a gaming desktop

your performance will drastically increase

like those even run TF2, lol

the most efficient $/improvement would be a mouse, then a ~200-300ish computer that can run the game at 120 on a shit config, then monitor.

I think the difference between going between a bad and a mid-level setup is huge (going from a shitty wireless mouse/tiny mousepad to literally any gaming mouse/mousepad, getting a computer that can hit your monitor's hz in fps), but that the difference between that and an extremely good computer is fairly negligible in the long run

Well I think my mouse is fine. It's not wireless, I feel comfortable with it, and it's consistent and doesn't jitter or freak out. I've adapted a high sensitivity because of the small size of my mousepad but I can play all classes well enough (except sniper but I couldn't give a shit). I'm just too worried and nervous about trying a new sens/mousepad because it would be, "fixing something that isn't broken," I suppose.

well there's no reason to have a tiny-ass mousepad regardless

it's incredibly easy to plateau if you don't have optimal hardware & equipment. Things like this would make the biggest impact in invite I'd imagine.

This. Upgrading your equipment will definitely help you get to the best of your ability, but it won't really raise the ceiling much, if any.

I went from a 60Hz LCD to a 100Hz CRT and noticed a huge difference.
I can't go back now, which is unfortunate :/

Where can i buy that? I've noticed my crt feels better than all of the lcds i've played on and my crt is only 75Hz.

going from 30fps in midfights to 120 could easily push your game further. it's all about whether he's upgrading from decent -> good hardware or horrible -> good hardware. effective potential improvement lowers as you approach closer to ideal hardware

i changed my mouse sensitivity from something very low to something high, (17 inches/360 to 6.3 /360) and my dm improved a lot also using the right interp is a life saver lol :3

i might invest in a 120hz monitor because while playing scout things blur together alot but thats only noticable to me on scout so idk

i did this for cs 1.6, i would have to play on like 20 fps, never even knew games could run so well when i got my first "gaming" computer

get above 120fps first even if you have a 60hz then mouse and lastly a 120hz monitor.

I was in the same situation as the op except I slowly got better gears because of casual lans. After winning my computer at the nor cal lan, I can actually run tf2 with 0 fps and noticed a huge difference and I also got a g500 which was way better mouse than the 5$ mouse from china I used to have. Lastly, I bought a 120hz from enigma and granted it isn't the best model and has a high input lag, nonetheless, its still 120hz and I cannot go back to 60hz. No matter what class you're playing (even medic to an certain extent), a 120hz will drastically improve your gameplay.

Should you really limit the fps to 120 if you only have a 60Hz monitor? What happens if you don't?

Overcalculating frames and they don't appear ideally. I mean technically any multiple of 60 is great, but generally 2x your refresh rate is fine.

Liek if you were at 150 fps and 60 hz, every 1/60 seconds the screen changes. Every 1/150 seconds, the video card has rendered a frame. Lets say at t=0, the screen updates. At t=0.0167 (1/60), the last frame rendered was 2/150 or 0.0133 (1/75). The next frame renders at 3/150 or at t=.02 (1/50), so the screen updates with a frame that was most recently rendered, .0167-.0133=.00333 seconds ago. Basically you're seeing something 3ms ago when it could have been a uniform update time. Not that big of a deal honestly, but sometimes monitors have a tearing effect.

Ah, good to know, thank you kindly.

this misconception annoys me.. and ive specified it before

monitor hertz and fps are not synced in any way shape or god damned form unless you enable vsync. tearing effects will still happen regardless of that

actually having higher fps is almost always better.

your assuming that the frame rendered is sent to the monitor at the same time as the monitor outputs, it doesn't, that's why screen tearing exists in the first place. screen tearing can occur any time a frame is out of sync, that happens all the god damned time. As your actually seeing two frames (one older and one new, obviously) at different parts of the screen) Vsync does more than just cap the frame rate to the refresh rate, it actually syncronizes the frame output from the card to the monitor and only sends the new frame when the monitor indicates it is ready to draw it(and that is why there is delay, even on CRTs)

so multiples of your current refresh rate really doesn't matter, just put a really high fps and it will be fine.