Counter-Strike 2 has a fancy new feature that makes demo playbacks 'match the player's original experience much more closely'

(Image credit: Valve)

In Counter-Strike 2, milliseconds matter. The tiniest time-slice can be the difference between virtual life and virtual death, so anything you can do to get bullets into braincases faster is likely to provide you an edge. Hence why CS2 lets players review their performance via demo playbacks.

Yet because of the way the Internet works, what players see in a demo playback may not reflect the game they experienced with complete accuracy. As of Counter-Strike 2's latest update, however, players should find playbacks better representative of live matches.

This is thanks to a new feature Valve introduced to the demo system named TrueView. "With TrueView, demo playback will match the player's original experience much more closely," Valve writes in a Steam post. "Previously demo playback showed the server's view of the world, without accounting for network latency. This could be confusing because shots would hit that didn't look like they should have, and vice versa."

As Valve explains, TrueView attempts to solve this issue by re-running the client-side prediction. Here your local game predicts where bullets, objects, players etc will move based on the information received from the server so far, then synchronises this with the next update from the server through a variety of "smoothing" algorithms.

The result, as Valve demonstrate in the post with a pair of comparison gifs, is a much more accurate playback of what players see during play.

That said, Valve does raise a few caveats. Primarily, it says "there may still be some differences between what you see in the demo and what the player originally saw". As an example, Valve points out that "damage effects will have different timing during demo playback due to the way CPU and GPU work are pipelined."

In addition, Valve notes that TrueView "will also perform damage prediction on enemies, if damage prediction was used by the observed player at the time," while the system is deactivated automatically when "the version of the game you are using to view the demo does not match the version of the game used to record the demo."

TrueView has been added to CS2 as part of today's patch, which also includes a couple of movement tweaks and animation fixes for the G3SG1 bolt. It's an intriguing update, albeit far less dramatic than the previous one, which apparently resulted in almost $2bn in losses for skin collectors.

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Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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