Great topic to dig into. The core issue most people get wrong is that client-side prediction and reconciliation aren’t just “make it feel snappy”—they’re about keeping the local simulation consistent with the server’s authoritative state. When you hold fire, your client applies the shot locally immediately, but the server is the only source of truth. The reconciliation buffer stores your unacknowledged inputs, and when the server snapshot arrives, you re-apply those pending inputs on top of the corrected state. If your reconciliation window is too small, you get rubber-banding on every packet loss spike; too large and you introduce input delay. Tune that buffer based on your RTT variance, not just average ping—Jitter matters far more than raw latency in shooters.
On the hardware side, people obsess over ping but ignore the rendering pipeline eating into their effective input lag. If you’re running 240Hz but your CPU can’t push frames fast enough to match, your prediction input is sitting in a queue waiting for the next frame to be sampled—so a 1080p low-settings build on a strong CPU often beats a maxed-out 1440p rig for competitive feel. Always run wired Ethernet, never WiFi, because WiFi’s CSMA/CA backoff creates micro-stalls that wreck reconciliation even at 20ms ping. And enable fixed-timestep simulation with a
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