Howdy! Integrating NVIDIA Reflex was done by my team, Gameplay Integrity, for VALORANT. If you have any questions about what it means for VALORANT or how it works just let me know. We're super excited to roll this out to players!
NVIDIA does an amazing job of covering Reflex here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/reflex-low-latency-platform/
Overall, I thought they knocked it out of the park with Reflex and was happy to work with them to see this live in VALORANT.
Read moreHey just wanted to say, as a Unity Developer of 5ish years a lot of what you talked about was very well understood and I have limited knowledge of networking. Unity uses RPCs and in a similar way the synced properties.
It was very interesting to see micro-managed solutions because when you’re developing you usually use whatever method “just works” with your code base. I can imagine the developers thought “these are just properties, let’s go the easy way and just have them automatically sync”. With RPCs you basically add an extra step in your code.
Have you guys ever experienced an impassible wall? In my experience, everything can be reworked to be completely viable solutions, however it would take a lot of extra development time to build out the perfect solution at every step. But I imagine something just wouldn’t be possible somewhere. I.E. a player’s ability just becomes too much for the GPU or increases frame times no matter what you tried. In networking, maybe...
My colleague wrote a great article on the lengths we went through to get through some pretty tough walls on the client with the visual targets we want to hit. https://technology.riotgames.com/news/valorant-shaders-and-gameplay-clarity
When we hit a truly impassable wall we try to reduce the problem back to it's basic essence in simplest terms and rethink our approach from there. In my experience, specific solutions can be unusable but you can usually solve the core problem another way. Some things have to be scrapped in the end though. A common joke on the team is that one day we'll do mirrors. ...
Read more25 ms frame times is 40 FPS; 20 ms is 50 FPS. FPS (which is a measure of performance) went up by 25%.
... That said, since the previous sentence was talking about frame time rather than frame rate, I'd guess this is a mistake.
Your FPS example is close to what I intended. If I were to make a 20ms task take 10ms I would see that as a doubling of performance (100%) not a 50% increase in performance. You can do double the amount of the work with the same resources. I can see how this is confusing the way I wrote it. Sorry and thanks for trying to explain it.
That was a cool read. I wonder how Riot feels about server performance since go-live. I see low server fps notification every other game. Kills take a noticeable moment to register. Playing Counter-Strike feels like playing on LAN in comparison. Do the lower tick rate servers process frames that much more quickly or is there something else?
We do monitor server tick rates on LIVE using the same data I show in this chart. For the vast majority of servers in we see a steady 128 tick rate. We do have a problem where on round transition the server takes a long time to setup the initial frame and spawn everyone in. That's usually when you'll see low server FPS show up in the top right.
You can actually see server tick rate in your game if you go to Video -> Stats -> Server Tick rate. You can see a graph of server frametime in realtime. It's generally a boring straight line. There are specific regions and specific data centers where they ran hot for periods of time and start to dip but we're constantly adding hardware as it's available and the player base grows.
The more common "server problems" tend to stem from networking outages on the route from players to our servers and complications that cause dropped packets or significant increases in network latency. The network graphs also exist in the settings me...
Read moreI actually enjoyed the amount of technical detail! I just finished my degree and I'm thinking about getting into Backend-Development/Engineering. Are there more informations available about which technology stack VALORANT is using on the backend and maybe how it influenced performance?
Glad you enjoyed it!
The servers that host games are a pretty simple tech stack. We deploy a single docker container that contains a go service that communicates back with the core game services that manage matchmaking players. The service just starts game server processes (which are written in C++ using the Unreal Engine).
You can read more about how the entire backend is developed and deployed in this series of tech blogs if you're interested. https://technology.riotgames.com/news/running-online-services-riot-part-i
In terms of performance, it didn't affect us much. I mention t...
Read moreGod my brain was thoroughly exhausted by the time I finished reading the article, its insane how many tweaks Riot had to perform to get the amount of juice they required from their servers. At times like this I wish I was a CS major instead of being self taught so I could better understand the concepts in the article.
I'm curious how Riot makes sure their tweaks to the Clocksource, C-states, OS Scheduler etc don't result in unusual, hard to replicate problems and what their cooling solution looks like.
Sorry if it was a bit much. I tried to ride a fine line of saying something meaningful and accurate vs being overly technical. In terms of cooling/power we don't really have many special requirements. I initially was concerned more about it but the actual power draw (and heat generation) wasn't even measurable in the test cases we looked at. I'd assume it has something to do with the way the power-supply / board draws power but I'm not certain as it's not my area of expertise.
Another thing to consider is that if we can reduce the number of hosts we even need to rack by tweaking, we can reduce overall power draw and heat generation of the data center.
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We're still working on perf improvements. We've hit a lot of the most glaring issues in the game right now. We're going to shift our performance focus towards more long term work that will be more chunky. We probably won't have something to drop every single patch anymore. We are looking to hire another engineer to focus on performance as well so if you know anyone... https://www.riotgames.com/en/work-with-us
i know this is an old thread, but are you guys measuring frametime consistency?
Maybe metrics like frametimes in combat?
Sudden FPS drops are much detrimental to gameplay than average FPS.
Yes we measure framerate consistency as well. We generally talk about it as "Combat Perf" internally and most of our recent optimization work has been focused specifically on this area.
We're of the mind that the lowest your framerate dips is the most important stat. However, the lowest it can dip is also going to be affected by your Avg framerate.
e.g. 60 FPS + 5ms stall = ~46FPS but 100 FPS + 5ms = 66FPS So we can keep your minimum framerate high by keeping your average high as well.
Read moreHey man! I love your work and the game is amazing. Thanks for this, first of all. Also love your great communication in this sub. I've found this thread about FPS because I tried looking if people have the same problems as I do.
I'm pretty sure I was getting 400+ fps constantly before (didn't actually record it though, so small chance that I'm wrong here), but played yesterday and saw drops below 250, down to 200-220 fps from time to time. It's way too low seeing how I'm using a 240Hz monitor!
I'm using a 9600k at 5.1-5.2GHz, 3600MHz CL17 16Gb RAM, overclocked 1080TI. My GPU is at 30% load and doesn't even boost to full clockspeeds unless I set graphics settings to High, so probably a CPU issue? CPU is at low % load as well though.
My question is, is FPS dropping to ~220 expected for a 6-core CPU overclocked to 5.2GHz? I was under impression that my hardware is best-care scenario right here, but I can't play with FPS above my monitor's refre...
Your experience is the one we measure as well. So nothing odd happening there. You're right that in these FPS drops scenarios you're hitting CPU limitations and not GPU ones. We're working on smoothing the framerate out in VALORANT overtime. We've had a number of fixes in the 1.0/1.01/1.02 patches and have further improvement planned but we've already done a lot of the low hanging fruit. We'll continue to patch performance work as it gets through development and testing. Your machine will likely have 240 (or more) completely smooth one day. I don't think any player ever got 400FPS completely smooth in VALORANT. The data we have just doesn't support that. I can say that VALORANT's performance now (according to the data we have) is the best it's ever been. Maybe MAYBE a 1% drop in performance from 1.02 but at the same time we did resolve several known FPS dips so I think framerate got smoother in 1.02 but maybe a 1% dip in the average framerate which we aren't targeting optimization...
Read moreThanks for a detailed /u/ImThour! This is exactly the kind of report we can review/fix/speak to effectively. This is a known issue that we've been working on for a little while now. We have a fix we're just about ready to begin testing internally. However, it may be several patches before we're able to get this live based on testing and managing it against some of the other performance work we have in flight. We think our fix should help a lot but may not completely resolve the issue. There are a couple different technical factors contributing.
/u/So_Obvious gives a good breakdown here of why high framerates will see this swing much ...
Read morei3-8100 3.6ghz
rx 580 8gb
16 gb ram.
in beta the game was running in 220~240 fps smooth af , after the 1.01 update it made it worse and now after 1.02 its even worse , like barely hitting 100
1920x1080
everything on low
144 hz
The averages for this CPU/GPU pair are:
1.00 : 146 FPS
1.01 : 154.46 FPS
1.02 : 154.42 FPS (unfortunately low sample size)
You're definitely performing below the average for this given spec and I'm not seeing a drop of that magnitude. I wonder do you have anything special about your setup? Have you tried playing with as other software on your computer disabled? Maybe it's some kind of software conflict? If you got a clip of the Video Stat Charts showing your framerate it might narrow down if we're seeing a GPU or CPU issue.
Just wanted to chime in. I reviewed our data since the patch and it says otherwise, but I'd like to make sure we're investigating all angles. Help me understand here. Does anyone having significant dips mind turning on all their video stat graphs on and sharing a clip? You can turn them on under Settings -> Video -> Stats. Having them all on will lower your framerate (slightly) so I don't recommend keeping it that way forever but it may help give us something to look into.
If you do so please also share your Spec: CPU / GPU / RAM / Resolution / Quality Settings
Other things I'd make sure to try and do before recording: Reboot your PC, Make sure your video card drivers are up to date, Make sure you've gotten the latest windows updates. Make sure you're comparing your spec to our list here: ...
Read moreWow this is weird. We didn't do anything on our end to do that. I just checked both my machines and both had affinity set properly (all CPUs enabled).
I'll keep asking around the team to see if anyone else has this issue.
For the record, OP is right. You should have all CPUs enabled in the affinity mapping. If you have this problem, maybe try listing your CPU + windows version to see if there is a commonality? You can get your windows version by pressing WinKey+R and running "winver". ex: Version 1803 (17134.1488)
P.S. There is a bug megathread stickied on reddit for each patch. It wasn't a beta only thing.
Hell yeah for Performance updates. That is the most important thing to me :)
Hope they help! The Multithreaded rendering is going to be very dependent on spec + where you measure FPS.
We're aware of this issue but have been unable to reproduce it internally. We already have a speculative fix prepared and patched out to some players. I don't know the exact deploy schedule but I am fairly certain everyone will have the fix by patch 1.1 planned for release on Tuesday.
Since we can't reproduce it we don't know everything about the issue but the fix is geared towards working around hardware/software incompatibility problems. Based on what we know I wouldn't be worried about it damaging your PC (although I do agree in general you don't want to manually shutdown your computer as default; computers have come a long way in fault tolerance in this area over the years).
I have tried disabling and enabling the settings but makes no difference. I have 144 fps in the lobby or wherever else but when I load into a game it goes to 200+. Not a bad thing at all but thought you'd like to know the setting is acting a little weird.
You know there is a separate frame rate limiter for menus in the settings right? It defaults to 144, that sounds like what's going on here. You can control the limiter separately so your GPU doesn't go into overdrive when in the menus rendering it at like 600FPS.
I have an ocd i5 9600k, 1080(no ti) also OCd and I get 265+ at all times on high why do you need to upgrade again>?
But I do plan on grabbing a 3 series, if I had a 1080ti not sure id need it unless 4k gaming
Yeah I do 4K gaming a lot. I'm partly joking about an upgrade; my computer can still chew through most games. I enjoy a lot of newer singleplayer adventure/shooter games as well and I missed out being able to use RTX on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Admit it, the title scared you! LMAO
Great work guys!
NGL, heart FPS dropped to 0 for a second.
I’m like constantly over 300 on all high with 8700k and 2080
Man I need an upgrade X_X. I'm still on the 4790K and 1080 Ti. Maybe when the 3080 comes out I'll just go all in.
My first time playing a riot game, and let me tell you everything I’ve heard about riot devs is true
You guys are incredible.
You guys are incredible! The love and passion y'all have for the game is incredibly humbling.
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