Question Internet speed drops dramatically in certain games ?

[tetrahexyldecyl]

Hello i am a streamer and i want to ask something. I keep having this one problem when i play a game while streaming. When i stream an offline game like death stranding, spiderman, etc my internet run smoothly, but when i play like hogwarts legacy, fm 23, valorant, apex, etc, my internet drops almost to 90% of my actual internet speed. Even when i put steam on offline mode to play fm 23, my internet speed still drop. I already search about this problem on youtube and google but i can't seem to having the answer. Is there any way to fix it? I'm using Lenovo Legion. Thank you.

 

[MagicSakura]

Have you ever observed the resolution during the game? Does the increased resolution result in higher live bandwidth requirements, which in turn affects network speed.

 

[MagicSakura]

Have you tried buying a video capture card? Use a video capture card to capture from the HDMI port and then encode to 1080p before live streaming. It not only reduces CPU load, but also reduces network bandwidth.

 

[tetrahexyldecyl]

Have you ever observed the resolution during the game? Does the increased resolution result in higher live bandwidth requirements, which in turn affects network speed.

I set on low graphics and 1920x1080 for every game but the problems still exist. This problem occurs only in every online game

 

[tetrahexyldecyl]

Have you tried buying a video capture card? Use a video capture card to capture from the HDMI port and then encode to 1080p before live streaming. It not only reduces CPU load, but also reduces network bandwidth.

Yes but the problem still exists.

 

[bill001g]

Does your internet speed actually drop. How are you measuring it. Do you test from a another device or are you trying to run something like speedtest on the same machine everything else is running on.

What might be happening is you are exceeding the upload bandwidth you buy from your ISP. If for example you have a internet conenction that is 75mbps down and 10mbps up, if you exceed the 10mbps upload speed you will limit your download speed. Every packet you download there is a small response sent to tell the server you received the data. This response will compete with all your other upload traffic.

 

[tetrahexyldecyl]

Does your internet speed actually drop. How are you measuring it. Do you test from a another device or are you trying to run something like speedtest on the same machine everything else is running on.

What might be happening is you are exceeding the upload bandwidth you buy from your ISP. If for example you have a internet conenction that is 75mbps down and 10mbps up, if you exceed the 10mbps upload speed you will limit your download speed. Every packet you download there is a small response sent to tell the server you received the data. This response will compete with all your other upload traffic.

Usually i'm measuring it using speedtest. Take example, when i play death stranding which we know an offline game with steam online mode, my speed internet work smoothly, it stays in 300 Mbps and my streaming goes smoothly too. But when i play an online game like valorant, my internet down to 6 Mbps and when i try to stream it, my streamlabs give a notice that my framerate is dropping and my stream goes lagging. Previously my internet speed was 100 Mbps so I thought the problem was there because it wasn't strong enough to play online games while live streaming. But when i upgraded my internet speed to 300 Mbps, it turns out the problem remains the same. It keeps going down to 6 Mbps

 

[bill001g]

Did they increase the upload rate when you went from 100 to 300 or is the upload rate the same.

The other issue you have that makes this hard is you are really pushing your machine running both the game and the steaming software on the same machine. Different games use very different resources so it is not always possible to say if you are having a real issue or if you are just for example running out of cpu capacity.

I would try to run a speedtest from your phone. It is not really a valid comparison since it runs on wifi but you should get more that 6mbps. If the phone is also slow then you are likely somehow exceeding your bandwidth.

 

[tetrahexyldecyl]

Did they increase the upload rate when you went from 100 to 300 or is the upload rate the same.

The other issue you have that makes this hard is you are really pushing your machine running both the game and the steaming software on the same machine. Different games use very different resources so it is not always possible to say if you are having a real issue or if you are just for example running out of cpu capacity.

I would try to run a speedtest from your phone. It is not really a valid comparison since it runs on wifi but you should get more that 6mbps. If the phone is also slow then you are likely somehow exceeding your bandwidth.

Yes, the upload rate has also increased. I have tried to perform a speed test on my mobile phone while my laptop was running Valorant and live streaming, and it turns out that the speed test on the phone is running normally. So the issue lies with my laptop. I have tried monitoring it using NetLimiter, but there doesn't seem to be any problem. However, my Steam application occasionally utilizes an upload rate of up to 20 MB/s. Can NetLimiter be used to resolve my issue?

 

[bill001g]

This is getting outside the scope of my knowledge. I know network stuff between devices when you talk about some kind of bottleneck internal to a machine it gets messy.

It is not likely just a simple network bandwidth issue. Your machine can easily run 1gbit of traffic, maybe even 2.5 if it has that port. It is more some other resource in the machine is the bottleneck and it just appears as a network problem.

Because your phone test fine when you are seeing issue on your pc it means it is internal to the pc. If the pc were using too much bandwidth it would affect the phone.