Valorant's 128-Tick Servers
7 hours ago
- #game-development
- #server-optimization
- #performance-tuning
- VALORANT requires 128-tick servers to minimize peeker's advantage and ensure fair gameplay.
- Initial server frame time was 50ms, optimized down to sub-2ms through code, hardware, and OS tweaks.
- Key optimizations included switching from UE4's Property Replication to RPCs for a 100x-10000x performance boost.
- Animation costs were reduced by 75% by processing every 4th frame and disabling animations during buy phases.
- Collaboration with Intel led to a 30% performance increase by upgrading to Xeon Scalable processors.
- NUMA optimizations improved memory access locality, boosting performance by 5%.
- Adjusting the Linux scheduler's migration cost to 0ms provided a 4% performance improvement.
- Limiting CPU C-States to higher power states stabilized performance, allowing 1-3% more games per server.
- Hyperthreading was initially disabled for a 25% performance gain but later re-enabled for further optimizations.
- Switching to the tsc clocksource in AWS environments yielded a 1-3% performance boost.
- Production environment issues were resolved by adjusting Erlang's scheduler thread count in Mesos deployments.
- Continuous measurement and optimization ensured VALORANT's smooth launch with accurate server hardware predictions.