[SOLVED] Great Internet Speed, but terrible game lag on PC/Xbox

Jan 13, 2022
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Hi there, I'm having issues with my game lag on both PC and Xbox One.

I have:
-Lenovo - Yoga C740 2-in-1 15.6" Touch-Screen Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 12GB Memory - 512GB Solid State Drive
-Fiber Internet with 1gig max speed (See below picture)

wtf.png


and yet I have problems with games such as:
PC> Runescape (I have had to play in lowest settings for it not to lag too much)
Xbox One> Call of Duty: Cold War/Battlefield V

any suggestions/questions would be greatly appreciated and answered
 
Solution
There are a couple issue with using speedtest.

First the location of the data centers is different from the game servers. So there might be some issue in the path to the game company. With a 2ms ping time you are testing to a server very close to your house.
Second speedtest is not affected as much by packet loss and variations in the latency ie jitter. It might show in the graph if the problem is really bad. It might decrease the total rates but the tool does not tell you if it is this or something else.

Game lag is mostly caused by packet loss or very large variations in the latency (likely over 200ms).

There are test sites that will test for ping loss and jitter but again these may or may not help because the servers...
There are a couple issue with using speedtest.

First the location of the data centers is different from the game servers. So there might be some issue in the path to the game company. With a 2ms ping time you are testing to a server very close to your house.
Second speedtest is not affected as much by packet loss and variations in the latency ie jitter. It might show in the graph if the problem is really bad. It might decrease the total rates but the tool does not tell you if it is this or something else.

Game lag is mostly caused by packet loss or very large variations in the latency (likely over 200ms).

There are test sites that will test for ping loss and jitter but again these may or may not help because the servers are in different locations.

You are better off doing all the testing manually.

I don't know if you can do this on your game consoles but you can do it on your laptop while you play on the game console. What you want to do open multiple cmd windows and leave a constant ping run to your router IP and to some IP in the internet like 8.8.8.8. If you can find the IP of the actual game server and they have not blocked ping you can test to that IP.

What you are looking for is to see if you see issues in the ping cmd windows when the game is having issues.

You seldom see issues on the ping to the router unless you are using wifi. You should always play games on ethernet connections, wifi is a well known cause of lag in games.

If you see no issues to the router but issue to the 8.8.8.8 or other IP the next step is to run tracert to 8.8.8.8 or the game server. It will likely not show anything interesting, what you are trying to do is get the IP of the routers in the path.
What you now want to do is add another cmd ping window and ping hop 2. This should represent the connection between your house and the ISP. It is the most common place to see errors. If you do call the ISP and show them you get no errors to your router but have issues to their router.

If hop2 is fine you can try other hops but the farther away from your house you get the harder it is to fix. I mean if the problem is in the game company ISP router you can't really do much.
 
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Solution