Sub tick is probably more accurate overall but I do think the cs2 animation netcode is crap and hides a lot of the positives. Hopefully moving to Animgraph 2 will help that, who knows
random fun fact but the animgraph in source 2 is based on code from here: https://github.com/BobbyAnguelov/Esoterica, thought it was interesting when I saw common symbol names
This is from 2020. Valve wanted to be smart and invented a new "subtick" system in 2023 which isn't as good as 128 tick. To make things worse, CS is a paid game, not free like Valorant, and makes probably much more money. They seemingly just don't care enough about the problem to solve it correctly. That or there is more work to be done on subtick to make it work better than 128.
Nowadays Counter Strike 2 is free to play, although a paid prime upgrade is almost required if you want to play decent matches with less cheaters. FACEIT requires prime status too.
CSGO could do 128 tick, Valve just doesn't want to pay for it, but you can easily find private hosted servers with 128 tick. Riot did put in a lot of work to get it down so much though.
> CS is a paid game, not free like Valorant, and makes probably much more money
(Veering offtopic here) Remember that Valve invented the free-to-play business model when they made TF2 free. As Gabe Newell said in some interview long ago, they made more money from TF2 after it went F2P ("sell more hats!")
Point being, being a paid vs free game is largely irrelevant to the profitability & engineering budget.
That said, I'm not sure why you say CS is a paid game. It is also free-to-play. Is some playable content locked behind a paywall?
In general, Valve designs software that is incomparably better than Riot. Compare the League of Legends client to the Dota 2 game (which doesn't even have a client/game distinction), for instance - the quality gap is massive in favor of Valve.
As a lifelong Valve/CS fan, I've been so disappointed with subtick. It was pitched as generational evolution to the games netcode. Yet years later they're still playing catchup to what CS:GO provided..
Hopefully competition from Valorant and others puts more pressure to make things happen at Valve.
There’s a long history of subtick bugs that have been identified and patched over the years. CS2 still isn’t quite as stable as 128-tick CS:GO (perhaps benefitting from a decade of patches and simpler architecture)
