Tick_rate_and_bandwidth

Tick rate and bandwidth

In Grid, tick rate can be adjusted on-the-fly with the tickrate console variable. By default, tickrate is set to a standard 20hz. While there are no minimum or maximum tick rate limits imposed by the game engine, there are practical limits based on bandwidth consumption.

The following table provides some payload size information that can help inform your desired tick rate. It's important to keep in mind that tick rates should be, at a maximum, closely related to your players' monitor refresh rate. Any frequencies beyond these levels are a waste of game frames, as there are no intermediate game states ever calculated on the client to provide value to the players. Additionally, if clients were to theoretically run at higher tick rates than the server, they could be calculating game states that don't actually occur.

Methodology

The calculations below assume each player is actively moving and transmitting a usercmd payload, at a minimum of 18 bytes per frame per player. Keep in mind that in real-world conditions, you should expect bandwidth requirements to be higher than the table below.

You should expect to be able to host a server with less than 16 players on a dial-up connection at 20-tick.

Tick rate	Download speed per player	host_maxplayers 16	host_maxplayers 1000
20	360 B/s	5.76 KB/s	360 KB/s
60	1.08 KB/s	17.28 KB/s	1.08 MB/s
75	1.35 KB/s	21.6 KB/s	1.35 MB/s
144	2.592 KB/s	41.472 KB/s	2.592 MB/s
240	4.32 KB/s	69.12 KB/s	4.32 MB/s

See also

1. 3kliksphilip (February 13, 2019). "CS:GO - 64 VS 128 Tick".