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[Sebastian Morris]

Rollback’s real advantage over delay-based isn’t just “feels better” — it’s that it decouples your perceived input latency from the RTT by simulating locally and correcting in retrospect. The GGPO model works by having each machine predict the opponent’s inputs at the current frame, then when the actual packet arrives, it detects the mismatch, rolls the simulation back to the last confirmed frame, and replays forward to reconcile. The key insight most people miss is that the quality of this depends entirely on how well your prediction matches reality, which is why fighting games — unlike shooters — can pull it off so cleanly. Every frame of input is deterministic in a fighting game’s physics engine, so a rollback just re-simulates from a known-good state; there’s no interpolation guessing involved the way you get with movement prediction in FPS titles.

From a hardware and competitive standpoint, the next frontier is handling asymmetric connections and jitter without the rubber-banding that makes early rollback implementations feel

"Nintendo 64 with UltraHDMI mod + EverDrive 64 X7 setup."

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