Responses to Blackout beta for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was largely positive, with lots of players calling it a more polished on the formula popularized by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. But there’s one area where Blackout doesn’t measure up to the other battle royales – tick rate. In fact, the Blackout beta had significantly worse server performance than the current iterations of Fortnite or PUBG.
Tick rates define how many times per second your game client receives information from the server. The higher the number, the better, meaning smoother online performance and less opportunities for inconsistent results in fast-action scenarios against other players. With their most recent updates, PUBG has a 60Hz tick rate and Fortnite has a 30Hz tick rate.
Both rates are variable depending on the current state of the match, but they only rarely drops to the lows of Blackout’s default tick. That’s 20Hz, according to netcode guru Battle(non)sense, and when the beta’s action was at its most intense in a match’s opening minutes, that number could drop as low as 10Hz.
All battle royale tick rates are variable to some extent, with PUBG dropping to around 40Hz before players hit the ground, and Fortnite going as low as 20Hz during the first minute or so of action. All that info, again, comes from Battle(non)sense – you can see the Blackout analysis below, and much more info on various games’ server performance throughout his channel.
The low performance is curious, since the beta for proper Black Ops 4 multiplayer was over 60Hz. Of course, it’s worth reiterating that betas may not be indicative of final performance, and it took both Fortnite and PUBG months of tweaks and updates to reach their current levels of stability.
It also bears noting that there were no widespread concerns about Blackout server performance up until now, so the low tick rate can’t have been too bad for most players – but that doesn’t mean it won’t eventually come up as people start to get more competitive. The Black Ops 4 release date is less than a month away, and we’ll see how the Blackout server performance evolves after launch.