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[Tyler Howard]

Hey everyone. Looking into the technical breakdown and hardware behavior on this, because you’ve actually stumbled onto the real crux of the problem.

Rollback netcode works by not waiting for the other player’s input. Instead of adding artificial delay to sync everyone (the old delay-based way), the game speculatively runs your character using a prediction of what the opponent is doing, while saving state snapshots frame by frame. When the opponent’s real input arrives, you re-simulate from the last known snapshot forward — that’s the ‘rollback,’ and those visible shoryuken fights are just the game correcting its prediction in real time. So the amount of latency you feel is NOT your raw RTT; it’s determined by how many frames the game buffers ahead while waiting.

Here’s the key for your specific case: with 165ms RTT and ±22ms jitter, a 4-frame jitter buffer is basically too small to be comfortable. The game has to keep rolling back more and more to catch up, which is exactly why you feel the rubber-banding. The good news is the FEC (forward error correction) part is doing its job — that’s why 3% packet loss didn’t even trigger a rollback, since it repaired the lost inputs on the fly. But FEC can only go so far.

Concrete fixes, in order of impact:

– Kill the jitter. 165ms baseline is fine-ish for rollback, but ±22ms jitter is what kills it. Use a wired Ethernet connection, not Wi-Fi. Enable QoS on your router to prioritize the game’s ports, and if your ISP allows it, prefer a UDP-based game transport over TCP.
– Consider a netcode relay service. Tools like the game’s own matchmaking, or third-party relays (e.g., Wartune-style servers, or for GGPO-based titles the built-in rollback servers) can dramatically cut effective RTT by routing through points of proximity.
– Frame-time consistency matters more than you’d think. If your PC dips frames, the local prediction gets out of sync with the snapshot schedule and makes rollback feel worse. Lock your framerate (cap it or enable V-Sync/FRTS) so your simulation clock stays stable.
– The trade-off you’re sensing is real: delay-based is more ‘consistent looking’ but has unavoidable input lag scaling with RTT. Rollback hides that lag at the cost of visual glitches. For a competitive game where reading opponent inputs wins rounds, rollback is the better deal — you just need to get your jitter down so the rolls get smaller and rarer.

Bottom line: it’s not that rollback is broken for you, it’s that your jitter is too high for the 4-frame buffer. Fix the connection first, then the rollback depth will shrink and the fighting will mostly go away.

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[Tyler Howard]

That clarifies the execution pipeline significantly. Tested the configuration and verified the behavior.

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