Riot Dives Into The Technical Details Of Valorant's 128-Tick Servers

From day one, Riot Games has talked about wanting to make Valorant run silky smooth on your computer, seeking to reduce latency and "peeker's advantage" as much as possible. Doing so has required impressive dedication to the underlying code of the game and its servers, and a lengthy description of that effort can now be found in today's blog post.

The goal of 128-tick servers, where each frame has to render in just 2.34 milliseconds was a daunting challenge -- especially when you consider that a frame initially took 50ms. "'Make the server 20x faster' isn’t a very tractable problem," as Riot's Brent Randall put it, so he and the team had to ... well, you see, they ... uh ...

It's a long and very technical piece, one that covers a wide range of steps the optimization team had to make, like proper hit detection, player health, load testing, and things like "non-uniform memory access," "C-states," and "hyperthreading." It's probably a good read if you really geek out for the finer points of software engineering, and even if you don't, it's a little amazing to realize all the work that goes into something as seemingly simple as "game go fast." (And should give you pause the next time you yell at the devs to "just make the game better, how hard can it be?")

If you leave a comment, though, don't be like the guy who said, "Didn't bother reading this jargon nonsense. Game is broken." And if you do want to be that guy, we'd suggest logging off for a while and maybe going outside and taking a walk.