Valve has officially moved AnimGraph 2 out of beta. The new animation system is now live for all CS2 players as of the April 21, 2026 update.
What is AnimGraph 2?
AnimGraph 2 is Valve’s overhauled animation system for CS2. It controls how player models move and behave in third-person, everything from how your character walks and crouches to how weapons are held and deployed.
The system has been in beta since early April 2026. Before that, Valve had already updated first-person animations back in July 2025, covering weapon deploy, firing, reload, and inspect animations for every weapon in the game.
The third-person side of things just caught up.
What changed in the full release
The full release carries over everything from the beta build, plus a handful of additional fixes and refinements:
- All third-person animations have been re-authored. Valve went through the full animation set and reworked it from scratch, adjusting several of them based on player feedback gathered during the beta.
- Viewmodel animations received minor adjustments. Small tweaks to how weapons look in first-person.
- Weapon deploy logic was adjusted. The general behavior when pulling out a weapon has been refined.
- Knife attack transitions are fixed. A bug causing issues when switching between knife attacks has been resolved.
- Dual Elites now shoot correctly in third-person. The Elites were broken in this regard, that’s now fixed.
On the performance side, AnimGraph 2 helps reduce both CPU usage and networking costs tied to animation processing. Less strain on your system and on servers.
Why it matters for your gameplay
The biggest gameplay-relevant change is how the new system handles movement. AnimGraph 2 smooths out in-air crouching transitions and refactors how player height behaves on sloped surfaces.
In practice, this means your character model behaves more consistently and predictably during movement, particularly in situations involving mid-air adjustments and uneven terrain.
Grenade lineups: check yours
This is the part that actually affects competitive play. Because player height on sloped surfaces has been adjusted, some grenade lineups on sloped ground may no longer work as expected.
If you rely on lineups that involve standing on a slope — smokes, molotovs, flashes — take time to re-verify them before your next match. Lineups on flat ground should be unaffected.
Full patch notes
[ ANIMGRAPH 2 ]
- Minor adjustments to viewmodel animations
- Adjusted general weapon deploy animation logic
- Fixed issues with transitioning between knife attacks
- Fixed Elites not shooting in third-person
[ MISC ]
- Fixed a bug that allowed silently climbing ladders at run speed by sporadically tapping movement keys
- Adjusted ground smoothing at locations where sloped ground surfaces transition to flat ground
- Fixed held grenades inheriting incorrect scale in some circumstances such as after being dropped and picked up
- Fixed a crash at halftime when transitioning from CT to T
