[forrestthewoods]

Lots of things work fine when you throw twice as many dollars at them. It’s not a matter of it working or not. It’s a matter of economics.

Most game servers are single threaded because the goal is to support the maximum number of players per dollar.

A community server doesn’t mind throwing more compute dollars to support more players or higher tick rate. When you have one million concurrent players - as CounterStrike sometimes does - the choice may be different.

[uyzstvqs]

The reason is actually related to accessibility for players whose clients can't keep up with 128 tick.[0]

[0] https://x.com/basisspace/status/993278875349041152

[Dylan16807]

Sure, twice as many dollars in the immediate term. In the context of a particular tick rate being decade(s) old, it's more like deciding whether you can host 50x or 100x as many players per dollar of infrastructure. The upside of a higher tick rate grows as computers and connections improve and the downside shrinks semi-exponentially.

[forrestthewoods]

Also twice as many dollars in the future term! The downside very much does not decrease “exponentially”.

It would be interesting to know what Valve’s server costs look like over time. They definitely spend the pretty penny. And any business would prefer to spend one penny rather than two.

[Dylan16807]

> Also twice as many dollars in the future term! The downside very much does not decrease “exponentially”.

The downside measured in dollars continues to decrease exponentially. If it's $100 today, soon it will be $30. It's still "twice", but the thing you're twice-ing is smaller and smaller and smaller.

[philipallstar]

I'm not sure this is true any more. Long gone are the late 90s when computing power per dollar would increase that fast.

[Dylan16807]

Comparing an Epyc 7763 from 2021 and a 9965 from 2024, the newer chip is something like 35% cheaper and faster, on a per-core basis.

We're still making good progress.