CYBERSHOKE is a large CS2 community server provider (see my previous post for a hint of their size). One of their gimmicks has been “optimising” the performance of the game, as the game has a lot to be desired on this front.
They recently raised the point that CS2 does not engage in occlusion culling: not rendering objects and players outside of the viewable distance. The predecessor, CS:GO, did.
This is bad for both performance and for combating cheating1.
CYBERSHOKE decided to deploy their own implementation on their servers… and boy is it flawed.
This was on a 5v5 competitive server.
- Teammates don’t send information out of distance, causing the tooltip above their head to spontaneously disappear.
- The bomb position does not update when you leave an area. If the bomb moves while you’re away, the game still believes the bomb is there even when you return. It shows up on the radar, and a phantom bomb light can be occasionally seen, but not the bomb.
- The radar position seems to have serious update rate issues.
- The sound to distance mapping is broken: the sound is inconsistent to their actual distance, or what you’d expect in standard Valve matchmaking.
To add to this, the pperformance uplift to clients is pretty marginal: nowhere near the 10-20% promised.
I don’t want to blame CYBERSHOKE here: they’ve earnestly tried to do something useful. But this harks back to the days when server operators tried to weasle additional performance out of their servers by performing all sorts of arcane hacks. And the end result worked, but bugs would be festered all over the place.
This practice stopped because CS:GO eventually became heavily optimised out of the box. CS2 isn’t, and so we can expect this to continue, until it is.
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Some information about this in a previous article I wrote. ↩︎