Counter Strike Source Tickrate

Many people are baffled, or at least very much confused when it comes to purchasing a server or playing on a server and finding out that there are different tickrates. The majority of gamers will know that the higher is better, but, what actually is tickrate on a games server? I have been in the gaming industry for a very long time and have advised people on what the difference between one server is and another, with regards to tickrate, but explaining the actual definition of server tickrate requires a much longer explaination then I have ever offered. The easiest way to explain tickrate in counter strike source servers is to use an analogy; that you must imagine your server is running on a heart beat of a ticking clock. Now, with each tick the server will perform certain tasks in game, such as processing any of the user inputs and updating anything in game. The tickrate is essentially the 'heart' behind the server and having a low tickrate means that the drive pushing through all the updates in game is delayed which means that everything will be much slower then a server with a higher tickrate.

However, in much the same way a heart beat cannot be increased indefinately the server tickrate has a limit to, because pushing the boundries on each tick will mean that instead of optimising on the best possible number of ticks, you are forcing the server to do too much. Valve have commented on the highest tickrate you should run on a server and believe 100 is the best, although you can run anything you want.

The majority of servers we host are either 66 tickrate, 75 tickrate or 100 although you will be able to find some archaic servers running on 33 tickrate.

Tickrate

The server tickrate is set in the command line of your game server. This means that the only place that you can change the server tickrate is by changing the command line, you cannot set it in the server.cfg

If you are unsure what tickrate you are running on, you can check the server vars to see. HLSW will allow you to do this and so will mani admin by using the {tickrate} variable in the adverts.txt