Great topic. The thing most people get wrong about rollback is thinking it just “guesses” your opponent’s inputs—really it’s about deterministic lockstep with controlled rollback. The key spec to chase is a tight rollback window; anything over ~5 frames of rollback per input starts feeling mushy because you’re re-simulating too much of the physics state. When I’m tuning, I watch the rollback counter graph in GGPO-style overlays and flag any sustained spike above 3-4 frames as a red flag. One edge case that wrecks matches nobody talks about: input reordering on the sender side. If your OS or driver coalesces or reorders buffered inputs (common with high-poll-rate mice on 1000Hz under load), the rollback sim gets garbage input and produces rubber-banding that looks like netcode failing when it’s actually your peripheral stack. Check your mouse poll rate and disable any “hardware acceleration” or input smoothing in your driver—people blame the netcode for something their Logitech/G HUB software is doing.
For failure-mode debugging, separate latency artifacts from actual desync.
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"Smooth frame time pacing matters infinitely more than peak FPS."
