What is the difference between burst and sustained DPS?

Burst DPS is your damage while you are actively firing with a loaded magazine. Sustained DPS multiplies that by your magazine uptime, accounting for the seconds lost to reloading, so it reflects damage over a long fight rather than a single clip.

How is crit damage averaged into the result?

Average hit equals base damage times one plus crit chance times the crit multiplier minus one. So 15 percent crit at a 2x multiplier raises every hit by 15 percent on average, even though any single shot is either a crit or not.

Why does hit rate reduce my DPS so much?

Misses deal zero damage, so DPS scales linearly with accuracy. Going from 85 to 95 percent hit rate is roughly an 11 percent DPS gain, often a bigger upgrade than a small flat damage boost.

Should I optimise for burst or sustained DPS?

Use burst DPS for short fights and assassinations where you rarely empty a magazine. Use sustained DPS for boss fights and prolonged engagements where reload downtime genuinely lowers your real output.

Does this match the in-game numbers exactly?

It uses a standard, correct DPS model, but games apply armor, resistances, falloff and hidden modifiers. Use it to compare two builds on equal footing rather than to predict an exact damage log number.

CS2 DPS Calculator — Gera Tools

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DPS — damage per second — is the single most useful number for comparing weapons and builds, but the headline figure most tools show ignores accuracy and reloads. This calculator combines base damage, percentage bonuses, critical hits, hit rate, fire rate, magazine size and reload time into both a burst and a realistic sustained DPS.

How it works

The full chain of multipliers is applied in order:

avgHit       = baseDamage × (1 + bonusDamage%)
critAvg      = avgHit × (1 + critChance × (critMult − 1))
effHit       = critAvg × hitRate%
burstDps     = effHit × attacksPerSecond
timeToEmpty  = magSize / attacksPerSecond
cycle        = timeToEmpty + reloadSeconds
uptime       = timeToEmpty / cycle
sustainedDps = burstDps × uptime

Critical hits are folded in as an expected value, so a 15 percent crit chance at a 2x multiplier raises average damage by exactly 15 percent. Misses contribute zero, which is why hitRate multiplies directly into effective hit damage.

Example

A weapon dealing 45 base damage at 10 attacks/sec, 15 percent crit (2x), and 85 percent accuracy lands an effective 44 damage per shot, giving roughly 440 burst DPS. With a 30-round magazine and a 2.5-second reload, magazine uptime is about 55 percent, dropping sustained DPS to around 240 — a gap worth knowing before a long boss fight.

Tips

Test two builds by changing one value at a time. Often a higher-accuracy, lower- damage build beats a glass-cannon build once misses and reloads are included. If your weapon never empties its magazine in a fight, compare on burst DPS instead.