Question Cause of Packet Loss ?

[Arcanef]

Hello,

last week i got new PC but unfortunately i am experiencing huge packet loss for like 1 second in pretty much all multiplayer games i played so far (PUBG, CS 2, Warcraft 3), usually it happens every 15-20 minutes.

I pretty much ruled out ethernet cable and router problems since my previous PC worked like a charm on the same setup and second PC connected to the router also works fine.

I got all latest drivers on everything.

my PC specs: 9950x3d, RTX 5090, 1200w Asus PSU, Corsair 64 GB Ram, Asus ROG Strix B850-E gaming wifi, 2 TB M.2 NVMe.

https://imgur.com/a/BZi38iF

 

[helpstar]

BIOS up to date of the motherboard?

did you connect the pc by wifi as well anytime before ?

firewall is set to private and not public?

lan driver up to date?
chipset driver as well?
did you try a different ethernet cable ?

 

[kanewolf]

Hello,

last week i got new PC but unfortunately i am experiencing huge packet loss for like 1 second in pretty much all multiplayer games i played so far (PUBG, CS 2, Warcraft 3), usually it happens every 15-20 minutes.

I pretty much ruled out ethernet cable and router problems since my previous PC worked like a charm on the same setup and second PC connected to the router also works fine.

I got all latest drivers on everything.

my PC specs: 9950x3d, RTX 5090, 1200w Asus PSU, Corsair 64 GB Ram, Asus ROG Strix B850-E gaming wifi, 2 TB M.2 NVMe.

https://imgur.com/a/BZi38iF

You can't rule out the cable just because your old PC worked. Each ethernet adapter is different. I would start with a new, factory made, round, 100% copper cat5e or cat6a cable.
You have a realtek multi-gig ethernet adapter. Nowhere does it say which specific model, but the 5Gbit Realtek is the RTL8126 so I will assume that is your LAN adapter. There is a driver from May on the Realtek webpage -- https://www.realtek.com/Download/List?cate_id=584 I would try that.

 

[bill001g]

Asus is one of worst offenders for loading bloatware with their drivers. I have not looked in a while but I suspect they install some kind of so called "gamer" network software. Used to be a variation of CFOSSPEED. Uninstall any software that claims to favor one kind of traffic over another or do any kind of QoS function.

The best way to rule out a cable is to leave a simple constant ping to the router IP run in the background. When you see issues with the game you can check this windows. You can also ping 8.8.8.8 if the router shows no loss. No loss to the router but loss to 8.8.8.8 would indicate you actually do have some kind of internet issue. The messy ones are when you see no loss to the router and no loss to 8.8.8.8. This means it is some strange software issue on the pc and not a simple driver or hardware issue.

 

[Arcanef]

Hi guyz,
first of all, thanks you reached out and trying to help.
Drivers: I checked all the drivers and are up to date, i actually did that as the first thing.
BIOS is the newest one.
WiFi: i tried it and its really bad, i have router in the next room so signal is quite scuffed but even if i take router closer its not stable at all.
Cable: i got a new one CAT5E UTP 100% copper but its the same, i even tried external LAN card to USB to try if my LAN port on mobo isnt faulty but its the same.
Firewall is set to public (recommended) it says.
Now, i pinged 8.8.8.8 and when i got big packet loss spike it showed request timed out otherwise it was fine , next i pinged my router and this even with packet loss never showed that request timed out it was completly fine.

https://imgur.com/a/oshT5TE

 

[bill001g]

So test again, I would leave ping to the router and ping to 8.8.8.8 running at the same time just to verify this.

What this basically means is the problem is likely outside your house. BUT just buying a new pc does not affect things outside your house. It also should affect the other pc. I guess you could run ping test on that one also and see if both machines see issues at the same time.

You need to get some consistent test data. It also depends on how much loss you get on the ping commands and does it always correspond to problems in the game. You always see ping loss here and there on all connection. If it starts coming anywhere close to even 1% though it causes large issues with games.

The normal next step when you thing it is your internet you run tracert 8.8.8.8. This will not show anything in most cases. What you are trying to do is get the routers in the path. The second hop is the first router in the ISP network for most people. You would want test to this point and see if you get loss. If you ping 8.8.8.8 the ISP will just blame google.

It could be thought that the problem is something else internal to the game or software on the PC and it just tells you there is packet loss.

Key step is to do some more testing to try to narrow this down.

 

[helpstar]

set network firewall to private
disable Wi-Fi

 

[Arcanef]

So setting firewall to private and disabling wi-fi didnt work.
I did more pings this time both at the same time (router and google) on both PCs and it was almost the same (second pc had one packet loss less for more than 2 hours), tracert looked fine.

Next i tested CS2 on the second PC and it was doing the same packet loss but i would swear when i played it on the old PC a month ago it was ok with the same router and fiber internet.

https://imgur.com/a/d7Y2iqj

https://imgur.com/a/ibYdCKx

 

[cruisetung]

Packet loss outside of your house almost has no solution unless you change route. But even a route change not necessarily will solve the problem.

 

[bill001g]

So the last set of test results show you have no actual network issue causing packet loss. This could simply be the 8.8.8.8 server did feel like answering the ping. Servers have limits on how many pings total from everyone per second they will respond to, to prevent denial of service attacks using the ping command.

You now kinda have 2 possibilities.

The first is that the game company has some issue with their network, the network between your ISP and their network, or maybe the servers themselves. You can do nothing about this so it doesn't really pay to investigate it.

The other is the game is telling lies. It tends to be more for very high latency rather than actual loss. What can happen is the so called "ping" that the game is running is being delayed by other game processes. So if the game send its ping and when the response gets back the game is busy doing say video rendering it will wait to read the response. It will then blame this extra delay on the network rather than admitting it wasn't looking at the response in a timely manner. This is why you see post on gamer forums saying you can fix network issue by changing video settings. The actual game video does not flow over the network but it does consume cpu resources.

Maybe try a different game server in a different data center if that is a option. You might also look into a VPN but this is very hit and miss. This would assume that the vpn service has a better path to the game company servers AND it also assumes you can get to the VPN data centers with no issues.