Home Gaming Overwatch is getting high bandwidth servers in the coming weeks

Overwatch is getting high bandwidth servers in the coming weeks

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Overwatch high bandwidth servers Tracer header

One of Overwatch’s best features is the simple fact that it’s playable here in South Africa. Despite being so far away from the European servers, it feels like the shooter has no lag whatsoever thanks to some truly magical netcode.

It’s not perfect unfortunately. You see, Overwatch’s servers run at a refresh rate of 21Hz, which is actually rather low for a competitive shooter. Have you ever tried to Recall with Tracer for example, and seen the animation start to take place, only to witness your death a moment later? That’s thanks to the game’s low refresh rate.

The community have long wanted something better, and it looks like Blizzard are going to deliver just that. They’ve announced that they’ll be rolling out high bandwidth servers for Overwatch over the coming weeks.

When we implemented the “High Bandwidth” option to Custom Games back in beta, we also noted that—if the feature performed well and players responded positively to it—we would investigate adding it to other games modes. We’re holding to that promise and are currently in the process of rolling out high bandwidth support globally for PC. This process may take a few weeks for all regions, but once fully deployed all games including those in Quick Play and Competitive Play will be running in high bandwidth mode by default.

So what does that mean? In Overwatch, our high bandwidth option adjusts the game’s client update rate (the frequency at which your client gets updates from the game server) from 21 updates per second to 63 updates per second. This reduces the amount of time between when you complete an action and when your client hears back about the result, which in turn will help make the game feel more responsive.

This is excellent news for sure, but I’m not sure how these new servers will affect our performance here in South Africa. Will the lag be better, or worse? I was always under the impression that a lower refresh rate worked in our favour (i.e.it levelled the playing field somewhat between ourselves and European players).

That, and our Internet (the ADSL at least) isn’t exactly known for stellar upload speeds. There’s also the problem of data usage – this update is going to triple it, which is a problem for those who aren’t on uncapped plans.

Thankfully, Blizzard are gracious gods. They’re putting tech in place that will cater to every kind of Internet user.

Since we know that not all internet connections are equal, we’ve also added in tech that will automatically and adaptively scale down your update rate if we find your connection can’t keep up. Similarly, because high bandwidth servers (as the name suggests) will increase your bandwidth consumption, we’re also looking to add an option to self-limit your update rate in a future patch.

Well that’s nice at least. Still, I wonder if these new servers will really benefit us, or prove to be detrimental.

What do you think? Am I just being a moron? I don’t really know much about refresh rates and such, so that may very well be the case!

Last Updated: August 15, 2016

21 Comments

  1. RinceThis

    August 15, 2016 at 13:16

    I agree with you Cabbage, you are a moron!

    Reply

    • Alien Emperor Trevor

      August 15, 2016 at 13:32

      So mean! Have some empathy!

      Reply

      • RinceThis

        August 15, 2016 at 13:39

        Does that come in a medium size!?

        Reply

        • Alien Emperor Trevor

          August 15, 2016 at 13:43

          I’m not a packaging expert.

          Reply

          • RinceThis

            August 15, 2016 at 13:43

            That’s what they all say? 0_O

          • Alien Emperor Trevor

            August 15, 2016 at 13:53

            Just how often do people try to shove you into a bag?

          • Admiral Chief - Check

            August 15, 2016 at 13:55

            42 times a week

        • Admiral Chief - Check

          August 15, 2016 at 13:43

          Medium to rare please

          Reply

          • Alien Emperor Trevor

            August 15, 2016 at 13:53

            I wish he was rare. Incredibly rare. Practically non-existent.

          • RinceThis

            August 15, 2016 at 13:56

            I’m famous!

          • RinceThis

            August 15, 2016 at 14:00

            The way all meat should be done!

          • Admiral Chief - Check

            August 15, 2016 at 14:04

            Not all meat, I like my bacon crispy, my chicken far from rare and my lamb medium

    • hairyknees

      August 15, 2016 at 14:53

      I KNEW IT! 😛

      Reply

  2. Gerhard Davids

    August 15, 2016 at 13:21

    I’ve played on the high bandwidth option using both fibre and adsl and it has no negative effects.
    It’s noticeably more responsive.

    A reddit user has also tested and it seems that the overwatch 63hz is more responsive than CS’s 64hz, which is good since that is where many of the tickrate outrage stemmed from.

    Reply

    • Matthew Holliday

      August 15, 2016 at 14:04

      thought the lower tickrate was supposed to be what made the game so responsive for us playing on the EU servers?
      Wouldnt increasing it, widen the gap between us and EU?

      Landing stuff like roadhog hooks and stuff should be a fair bit more challenging for us.

      Reply

      • Admiral Chief - Check

        August 15, 2016 at 14:06

        Mind the gap

        Reply

      • Gerhard Davids

        August 15, 2016 at 14:36

        Nope, the favor the shooter is what makes life good.
        They have sanity checks on the server that effectively bump your target back in time to make sure they were actually where you are shooting.

        They recently capped this rewind to 250ms to avoid high lag players affecting low latency players negatively.

        The tickrate issue is this. A game updates at a steady rate each second. Anything from 10 times to 1000 times depending on game.

        Your client sends and gets information at a rate that is in sync with the servers expectations. 20hz in the old implementation. This means the server and client chat 20 times a second to keep your client up to date with the actions of other players. This is the tickrate.

        Upping this rate to 60 times a second makes your client know sooner when something happened on the server. Meaning you can react far better, at the cost of 200% more comms with the server. So now updates every 16ms instead of every 50ms.

        The reason everything is still smooth at such a slow update rate is thanks to interpolation.

        Reply

  3. Ottokie

    August 15, 2016 at 13:25

    Good guy blizzard strikes again

    Reply

  4. Kromas GG

    August 15, 2016 at 14:53

    Well … that thing that I am doing is still up.

    Just saying. 🙂

    Reply

    • hairyknees

      August 15, 2016 at 14:53

      … Wot? 😛

      Reply

  5. Manfred Higgs

    August 16, 2016 at 11:41

    “it feels like the shooter has no lag whatsoever thanks to some truly magical netcode” Could not lol hard enough at this. Seriously….. pings of 200+ make for a pretty bad experience overall, I barely even play anymore and competitive is a joke. We desperately need local servers.

    Reply

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