[SOLVED] Ping spiking in games and discord although when I ping from cmd to any server or website the ping time is good

[kristof_rusin]

Hello, since 27th March ive been having internet problems. Before that everything was fine, my ping was stable and I was able to play all the games I wanted now im not able to play anything. My ping is spiking in CS2, Rocket League and many other games from 30 to 200ms or even more and its just not stopping. I dont know what to do anymore. Ive upgraded my internet speed, tried everything, even changing my Ethernet cable. Nothing worked. I have no idea if this problem is on my side or the internet provider. Today I tried pinging from cmd to discord.com or even game servers and the ping was stable, however I let the ping run on my second monitor as I was playing Rocket League and I was still having huge spikes in the game, although the cmd pings were stable around 30-35ms. I dont know if its something in the hardware, but I didnt change a single thing in my PC it just started happening out of nowhere. Can you guys help me please 🙁.

This is how it looks in the game:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kItrPBzr0M

 

[bill001g]

Lag spikes are caused by many things but people seem to always think they are network.

When ping commands you run in the back ground are unaffected it generally means you network is fine. Since you are pinging the game servers it can not even be some strange issue between ISP. Discord I am not so sure since traffic going to discord is kinda different than games.

The problem with games is they tell lies. Although most don't actually use ping it works the same way. What can happen is the game gets busy say in some video frame generation. When it finally gets done doing this it looks in the buffer for the response to the ping. It then blames all the delay on the network when the packet was sitting there all the time and the game did not bother to read it.

These type of issues tend to be hard to find because they can be in the actual game engine code. You see people report they fix ping/lag issue by changing video settings. Makes no sense since the video only travels between the video card and the monitor over the video cable it never goes over the network.

A real network issue almost always affects a ping command. If it was something with your ISP or the network outside your house it would affect other machine in your house as well.

I would verify that you are running the current video drivers for your card. Maybe even try the previous ones.

Note...look for any software you might have installed that claims favor one type of traffic over another. It many times comes bundled in the bloatware with video cards and motherboards. Cfosspeed is a very common name but there are a couple others. Anything like that you want to uninstall. These type of programs can do nothing to affect latency outside your machine and if you have a network issue inside your machine you are doing something very strange. This type of software seems to have lots of bugs and you get very strange almost unexplainable issues.

 

[kristof_rusin]

Lag spikes are caused by many things but people seem to always think they are network.

When ping commands you run in the back ground are unaffected it generally means you network is fine. Since you are pinging the game servers it can not even be some strange issue between ISP. Discord I am not so sure since traffic going to discord is kinda different than games.

The problem with games is they tell lies. Although most don't actually use ping it works the same way. What can happen is the game gets busy say in some video frame generation. When it finally gets done doing this it looks in the buffer for the response to the ping. It then blames all the delay on the network when the packet was sitting there all the time and the game did not bother to read it.

These type of issues tend to be hard to find because they can be in the actual game engine code. You see people report they fix ping/lag issue by changing video settings. Makes no sense since the video only travels between the video card and the monitor over the video cable it never goes over the network.

A real network issue almost always affects a ping command. If it was something with your ISP or the network outside your house it would affect other machine in your house as well.

I would verify that you are running the current video drivers for your card. Maybe even try the previous ones.

Note...look for any software you might have installed that claims favor one type of traffic over another. It many times comes bundled in the bloatware with video cards and motherboards. Cfosspeed is a very common name but there are a couple others. Anything like that you want to uninstall. These type of programs can do nothing to affect latency outside your machine and if you have a network issue inside your machine you are doing something very strange. This type of software seems to have lots of bugs and you get very strange almost unexplainable issues.

Thank you very much for your response, I'm going to try everything you said and let you know. Have a good day

 

[kristof_rusin]

Lag spikes are caused by many things but people seem to always think they are network.

When ping commands you run in the back ground are unaffected it generally means you network is fine. Since you are pinging the game servers it can not even be some strange issue between ISP. Discord I am not so sure since traffic going to discord is kinda different than games.

The problem with games is they tell lies. Although most don't actually use ping it works the same way. What can happen is the game gets busy say in some video frame generation. When it finally gets done doing this it looks in the buffer for the response to the ping. It then blames all the delay on the network when the packet was sitting there all the time and the game did not bother to read it.

These type of issues tend to be hard to find because they can be in the actual game engine code. You see people report they fix ping/lag issue by changing video settings. Makes no sense since the video only travels between the video card and the monitor over the video cable it never goes over the network.

A real network issue almost always affects a ping command. If it was something with your ISP or the network outside your house it would affect other machine in your house as well.

I would verify that you are running the current video drivers for your card. Maybe even try the previous ones.

Note...look for any software you might have installed that claims favor one type of traffic over another. It many times comes bundled in the bloatware with video cards and motherboards. Cfosspeed is a very common name but there are a couple others. Anything like that you want to uninstall. These type of programs can do nothing to affect latency outside your machine and if you have a network issue inside your machine you are doing something very strange. This type of software seems to have lots of bugs and you get very strange almost unexplainable issues.

Hello again, tried everything you said reinstall drivers and everything just still lagging, I don't know what could be the issue anymore, it just seems that on every game I'm playing I have a lot higher ping than everybody.

 

[bill001g]

The actual ping number is not most important thing. With games it needs to be consistent. If you say constant get 100ms it is very different than if you get 30ms then 200ms then 50ms etc. The games are designed to account for the time it takes to travel between your machine and the server. If this time randomly changes a lot then the game can not predict the locations when you get the data. When the next packet arrives with a different estimate your location suddenly changes and you see it as lag.

BUT you need to be 100% sure it really is a network issue before you spend lots of time trying to debug that. Your initial testing with the ping command say you do not have a network problem.

Try to turn everything down on the video settings for the game. Run everything on low at say 1080. Set the frame rate to say 60 so that the video card does not render extra frames.

 

[kristof_rusin]

The actual ping number is not most important thing. With games it needs to be consistent. If you say constant get 100ms it is very different than if you get 30ms then 200ms then 50ms etc. The games are designed to account for the time it takes to travel between your machine and the server. If this time randomly changes a lot then the game can not predict the locations when you get the data. When the next packet arrives with a different estimate your location suddenly changes and you see it as lag.

BUT you need to be 100% sure it really is a network issue before you spend lots of time trying to debug that. Your initial testing with the ping command say you do not have a network problem.

Try to turn everything down on the video settings for the game. Run everything on low at say 1080. Set the frame rate to say 60 so that the video card does not render extra frames.

Hello, I take back what I said, I've rolled back my Nvdia driver to 5th March one and voilà everything is back to normal. Thank you very much Bill for your time to help me. ))))))))