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[Nathan Cooper]

Followed the advice, framedrops stopped after changing that bios setting, thanks guys! Specifically the XMP profile was actually destabilizing my NIC’s DMA ring buffers and causing those bursty 200ms+ hitches in-game, not my GPU as I’d been blaming it. Flipped the PCIe gen setting back to auto, bumped my RX/TX ring buffer sizes, and disabled that power-saving “green ethernet” option my mobo came with. Ran a quick iperf3 test against a local box and the jitter basically flatlined. Also finally got clarity on the FEC question—turns out my router’s QoS was mis-tagging my game ports, so the concealment algorithm was choking on reordered packets. It’s been rock solid for 3 days straight now, even during my roommate’s 4K streams. Appreciate the help, this sub actually knows its stuff.

"London, UK • i5-13600K & RTX 4080 Super"

[Nathan Cooper]

Great topic. The core distinction comes down to where the simulation of “truth” lives. Hitscan is essentially a server-side raycast: the client fires on input, interpolates the bullet instantly for feedback, but the server re-runs the raycast against authoritative hitboxes and applies latency compensation by replaying the target’s predicted position (their last-known location + velocity extrapolated over ping). The tricky part is that different engines handle hitbox reconstruction differently—some use a “ghost” snapshot of where the player was during the round-trip time, others use extrapolation, which is why shots feel inconsistent against high-latency opponents. For competitive fairness, authoritative hitscan with proper latency compensation is ideal, but it means your crosshair placement has to account for server-side hitbox snapping, not just your visual prediction.

Ballistic projectile registration is fundamentally different mathematically because you’re now simulating a physical entity with velocity, gravity drop, and drag rather than an instantaneous ray. The server tracks the projectile’s position via numerical integration (usually semi-implicit Euler or Verlet) each tick, and hit detection requires checking collision against hitboxes every simulation step, which is more expensive and prone to tunneling at high velocities—hence the need for swept collision or continuous collision detection. The interesting part for players is projectile lead: you’re no longer aiming at the target’s visible position but solving for the intercept point where the target will be, factoring in projectile speed and distance. This is why weapons like the Praetor’s railgun feel so punishing at range—small errors in your velocity estimate compound quadratically with distance because of gravity.

My advice: if you’re tuning or optimizing, prioritize tick rate and interpolation?

"London, UK • i5-13600K & RTX 4080 Super"

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