Question Awful lag when gaming ?

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gamer123214343

Feb 10, 2024
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Hello, Ive been dealing with a crazy lag in games recently. After 5-10 minutes the gameplay gets worse and worse for some reason. Could it be that my router does not accept packets and they get stuck in the queue so everything seems delayed on my screen? I have a 600mbs download with 32 ping to London and +100 download latency, 50 upload and its FIBER internet...

Also its not a PC issue, because it happens on my PS5 too.
 
Very rare for it to be the router itself. It doesn't do much just translates the internal IP to the external ones and that is done via special hardware. If you have some kind of firewall rules or data filtering it can but it is not common.

If you are using wifi that can cause the issue.

Open at least 2 cmd windows and leave constant ping commands run to IP while you play the game. When the game detects a issue quickly switch to the ping windows and see if you see packet loss of very high latency spikes. You want to ping your router IP and a common IP like 8.8.8.8. If you see issues to the first the problem is inside your house. If you see issues to 8.8.8.8 but not router router it means there is some issue in the path between your house and the ISP. If neither show issues then it is more likely it is something with the game. It can be the game server or the game companies connection between their ISP and your ISP. You are not going to be able to do much about issues in the game company or its ISP so you need to hope it is something else. Many times games lie and blame network issues when it is some issue with their code, which is why you want to use the ping command to verify.
 
Thank you for your reply, I did what you told me and I didnt notice anything weird. But I also pinged the game server in cmd and everything looked normal, 25-28 stable ping, yet while playing in the resource monitor it shows 24-60-25-44-63-26-60...
 
More information needed:

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

What games are you playing? Source?

Make and model : modem, router, or modem/router if combined?

Note: May not be a PC issue per se but the PC can be used to troubleshoot.....
 
Ralston18 said:
More information needed:

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

What games are you playing? Source?

Make and model : modem, router, or modem/router if combined?

Note: May not be a PC issue per se but the PC can be used to troubleshoot.....
Click to expand...
 
The network code in the game will most times tolerate much more latency spikes that you are seeing. Most times you need over 100ms over the average to even detect it in actual game play. It is something like 200ms spike or more than really causes big issues.

It is hard to say what resource monitor is looking at. There are many session open when you play online games. They many times even have session open to many different servers that are in different locations. Most games use UDP to talk to the game server that you are running on. Resource monitor does not calculate latency on UDP sessions. Many times games have open TCP sessions to somethings like the authentication server. This is more the login server not the actual server the game is running on. Hard to say you would have to know the details of how a certain game really works and they do not release that, the idiot hackers in online games are bad enough even without that information.

It all really doesn't matter. If you get no issues with a ping command then it means you do not have a actual network issue. It could be a issue with the a particular data center location but you can do nothing about that so it is a waste of time to chase it.

This is more acting like there is some issue with the game itself. It can be so many things. I know people "fix?" so called network issues by changing in game video settings. This is silly singe the video goes between your video card and the monitor and does not pass over the network.
 
Another thing is port forwarding, upnp dont work. I even set DMZ and it doesnt open any ports. Or maybe it shouldnt when you play games? But then why do people say you should have upnp on to play or forward ports?
 
You see a lot of garbage on the internet, and especially on gaming forums. You have many people who just cut and paste stuff they find with no idea what it means so when you get misinformation it just get compounded by the cut and paste idiots. You might as well ask chatgpt, that though might give you the correct answer.

Port forwarding/dmz/UPnP is all related to having some kind of server in your house. You see this in some console games where there is no central server and one of machine must act as the host. It is also used in games that have private servers such as if you wanted to run your own minecraft server.

The vast majority of games people are asking about on this forum have central server run by the game company. The GAME company not you needs to make sure the ports get to their servers. When you run a port scanner even if you have port forwarding rules setup there is no server in your house to respond to the port scanner.

The game companies are partially responsible for this confusion. The people making forum wiki and FAQ things tend to not be networking professionals......they could make much more money than being a customer service rep for a game company.

What you will see are list of ports that need to be "allowed". This does not mean they need to be port forwarded it means if there is a firewall it must allow this traffic to pass. It would be almost better if they did not post this since almost nobody runs a firewall. The idiots on the gaming forums somehow translated this into meaning you have to port forward these ports.

In addition none of this can cause your issue. If you need port forwarding or firewall rules the game or certain function in the game would not work at all. Again more misinformation on gaming forums claiming port forwarding reduces lag. This is purely on/off thing your game will work or it will fail.

Lag is always caused by data being delayed someplace. It can be in the network but it can also be in all the code buffers in the game moving data between the cpu and the GPU.
 
Another thing is the time of the day - in the morning its pretty good, in the afternoon and evening - unplayable, the whole gameplay is unstable, everything is literally floating. Unfortunately no other ISPs offer internet in my area...
 
No again you only need port forwarding when you have a server running in your house. Now if you mean you purchased a vpn server box then you need to forward but I suspect you are not wanting to remotely access your home network. When you use a vpn service on the internet the vpn provider is running the server.

A VPN is pretty much going to be luck if it fixes your issue. Your ping testing to 8.8.8.8 indicates there is not issue in your ISP and its connection to google. The problem would have to be in the path between your ISP and the game company ISP and that is somehow different than the path to google. For a vpn to fix this your ISP would need a path to the vpn data center that has no issues and then the vpn data center must use a different path to the game company ISP/servers. All you can do it try it.

Maybe redo the ping test to 8.8.8.8 at night when you are having large issues. When you have time of day issues it tends to be other peoples usage causing the problem. You share all the bandwidth on the fiber going between your house and the ISP with all your neighbors. A common system has 2.4gbit of bandwidth shared with up to 64 houses. So it only takes a few people doing very large downloads to affect everyone else.

It tends to be rather rare, this used to be much more a issue when the total network bandwidth was well under 1gbit and they would share it with 200 or more houses.
 
East to West coast in USA take just over 80ms. 100ms latency is on the high end in my opinion. Any idea it's so high? How far are you from the server?

Check your ping value from home to the server with following stats.

https://wondernetwork.com/pings

Also avoid wifi if you can, it adds latency.
 
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Having fiber to your house only decreases the latency by about 5ms over say a cable modem. The high latency must be someplace else.

Pretty standard use a tracert command and trace the path to the game server. In some cases the game company will block trace/ping to the server but generally the firewall is in the same data center so there is not really any latency past it.....not that you could fix it even if there was.

You might try different game server locations just to see what is different.

Your goal is to see where the latency jumps up a lot. In most cases you can't do much about this since the various ISP control the path. This is where vpn like wtfast "might" benefit you. In some ways you hope it is in hop 2 which should be your fiber connection but it highly unlikely on a fiber.

It depends on the game but you want to trace to the actual server you are playing on. Game companies have other servers like login and match making servers depending on the game. All you care about is the one you run on once the game start. Note you can generally see this ip address in the network tab of the resource manager while the game is running. It should have constant traffic running to it.
 
You main post says it affects the ps5 also. I would say a power supply would be the last thing I would suspect. Generally bad power supplies you get system crashes not high latency.

So you really need to be sure this is affecting multiple devices or you are going to be chasing the wrong thing.

This is getting to be a long thread and I am unsure if you have tried some of the simple things. Since it appears you have a router that is plugged into some kind of fiber modem can you test removing the router and plug your pc directly into the fiber box. This would eliminate some strange issue in the router causing this.
 
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