09-04-2009, 09:25 AM
Ive been playing with pingboosting the server for some time, but there isnt that much information about it since most all of the hosted ones dont allow pingboosting - it simply eats too much cpu power.
Pingboosting is a method of increasing the FPS (Frames Per Second) rate; TF2 dedicated servers run at about 100FPS. If you use the standard "trick" to pingboost, it bumps this to about 250FPS (except on AMD systems, which for some reason only run about half of that).
Recently i figured out an alternative method, and can now boost to the full 1000FPS!
The key reason to run higher FPS is the render time. At 1000FPS, the server is rendering one frame every 1 millisecond (ms). This means that the worst-case adder to the player ping is only 1ms, IE: the player gets more accurate data and can get it more often.
At 300FPS it's only 3ms which is perfectly acceptable, but at 100FPS it's 10ms, which is a significant percentage of a 100 ping (10%). A player with a 100 ping would actually be getting 110ms response time from the server.
Even though it works, it eats so much cpu that on the present hardware i cant run a 32 slot server AND pingboost it to the 1000FPS. So until i get the hardware upgraded we are stuck at 250FPS; actually not too bad, just an additional 1.5ms over 1000FPS and much better than the stock 100FPS hosted versions (2.5ms vs 10ms or a 4x improvement).
Pingboosting is a method of increasing the FPS (Frames Per Second) rate; TF2 dedicated servers run at about 100FPS. If you use the standard "trick" to pingboost, it bumps this to about 250FPS (except on AMD systems, which for some reason only run about half of that).
Recently i figured out an alternative method, and can now boost to the full 1000FPS!
The key reason to run higher FPS is the render time. At 1000FPS, the server is rendering one frame every 1 millisecond (ms). This means that the worst-case adder to the player ping is only 1ms, IE: the player gets more accurate data and can get it more often.
At 300FPS it's only 3ms which is perfectly acceptable, but at 100FPS it's 10ms, which is a significant percentage of a 100 ping (10%). A player with a 100 ping would actually be getting 110ms response time from the server.
Even though it works, it eats so much cpu that on the present hardware i cant run a 32 slot server AND pingboost it to the 1000FPS. So until i get the hardware upgraded we are stuck at 250FPS; actually not too bad, just an additional 1.5ms over 1000FPS and much better than the stock 100FPS hosted versions (2.5ms vs 10ms or a 4x improvement).