Counter-Strike 2 vs Valorant: Will promise of improved tick-rate mark the end of Riot's shooter?
Valve's Counter-Strike 2 promises to deliver better performance than any game in the franchise has done. This, among other things, could mean a potential disaster for Riot Games' Valorant if players decide to jump back to their original ship. The upgrade to CS:GO has been in the works for a while now and the hype around it had been building up for the last couple of weeks.
In a surprising move, Valve finally confirmed yesterday that the title is slated to be released in Summer 2023, with the limited testing period starting immediately.
The Counter-Strike vs Valorant debate has been going on ever since Riot's character-based tactical shooter came out. However, considering the latter was a newly developed game that incorporated more advanced tech, it was considered to have the upper hand. With the release of Counter-Strike 2, that edge doesn't look quite so sharp anymore.
To answer this question, it is important to understand what tick-rate is to begin with. It is the frequency at which a server can process and respond to information it receives in a game. In FPS titles, this translates to how quickly all sorts of movement and fired bullets are registered. It can make a world of difference when peeking angles, leading to the infamous concept of peeker's advantage.
Developers have been attempting to maximize the power of their servers to process information as fast as possible in order to minimize the gap between a command entered by the player and it coming into effect in-game.
When Valorant came out in 2020, it was the first game to offer 128-tick servers at launch. This gave Riot's FPS title a significant edge over its immediate competition in CS:GO and Overwatch 2, both of which ran on 64-tick servers for the most part.
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