Valorant's 128-Tick Servers (2020)

As a lifelong Valve/CS fan, I've been so disappointed with subtick. It was pitched as generational evolution to the games netcode. Yet years later they're still playing catchup to what CS:GO provided..

Hopefully competition from Valorant and others puts more pressure to make things happen at Valve.

Re: Valorant's 128-Tick Servers (2020)

#5

Post by jauntywundrkind » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

> In VALORANT’s case, .5ms is a meaningful chunk of our 2.34ms budget. You could process nearly a 1/4th of a frame in that time! There’s 0% chance that any of the game server’s memory is still going to be hot in cache.

This feels like an unideal architectural choice, if this is the case!?

Sounds like each game server is independent. I wonder if anyone has more shared state multi-hosting? Warm up a service process, then fork it as needed, so there's some share i-cache? Have things like levels and hit boxes in immutable memfd, shared with each service instance, so that the d-cache can maybe share across instances?

With heartbleed et al, a context switch probably has to totally burn down the caches now a days? So maybe this wouldn't be enough to keep data hot, that you might need a multi-threaded not multi-process architecture to see shared caching wins. Obviously I dunno, but it feels like caches are shorter lived than they used to be!

I remember being super hopeful that maybe something like Google Stadia could open up some interesting game architecture wins, by trying to render multiple different clients cooperatively rather than as individual client processes. Afaik nothing like that ever emerged, but it feels like there's some cool architecture wins out there & possible.

Re: Valorant's 128-Tick Servers (2020)

#6

Post by Thev00d00 » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

mmmeff wrote: post #2

Take notes, Valve.

Sub tick is probably more accurate overall but I do think the cs2 animation netcode is crap and hides a lot of the positives. Hopefully moving to Animgraph 2 will help that, who knows

Re: Valorant's 128-Tick Servers (2020)

#7

Post by deathanatos » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

128 ticks per second servers. (And lo, suddenly the article's thesis is inherently clear.)

A "tick", or an update, is a single step forward in the game's state. UPS (as I'll call it from here) or tick rate is the frequency of those. So, 128 ticks/s == 128 updates per sec.

That's a high number. For comparison, Factorio is 60 UPS, and Minecraft is 20 UPS.

At first I imagined an FPS's state would be considerably smaller, which should support a higher tick rate. But I also forgot about fog of war & visibility (Factorio for example just trusts the clients), and needing to animate for hitbox detection. (Though I was curious if they're always animating players? I assume there'd be a big single rectangular bounding box or sphere, and only once a projectile is in that range, then animations occur. I assume they've thought of this & it just isn't in there. But then there was the note about not animating the "buy" portion, too…)

Re: Valorant's 128-Tick Servers (2020)

#8

Post by fngjdflmdflg » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

mmmeff wrote: post #2

Take notes, Valve.

This is from 2020. Valve wanted to be smart and invented a new "subtick" system in 2023 which isn't as good as 128 tick. To make things worse, CS is a paid game, not free like Valorant, and makes probably much more money. They seemingly just don't care enough about the problem to solve it correctly. That or there is more work to be done on subtick to make it work better than 128.

Re: Valorant's 128-Tick Servers (2020)

#9

Post by actionfromafar » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #7

128 ticks per second servers. (And lo, suddenly the article's thesis is inherently clear.) A "tick", or an update, is a single step forward in the game's state. UPS (as I'll call it from here) or tick rate is the frequency of those. So, 128 ticks/s == 128 updates per sec. That's a high number. For comparison, Factorio is 60 UPS, and Minecraft is 20 UPS. At first I imagined an FPS's state would be considerably smaller…

And Fortnite is allegedly 30 ticks per second.

Re: Valorant's 128-Tick Servers (2020)

#10

Post by Hikikomori » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #8

mmmeff wrote: post #2

Take notes, Valve.

This is from 2020. Valve wanted to be smart and invented a new "subtick" system in 2023 which isn't as good as 128 tick. To make things worse, CS is a paid game, not free like Valorant, and makes probably much more money. They seemingly just don't care enough about the problem to solve it correctly. That or there is more work to be done on subtick to make it work better than 128.

CSGO could do 128 tick, Valve just doesn't want to pay for it, but you can easily find private hosted servers with 128 tick. Riot did put in a lot of work to get it down so much though.