Counter-Strike 2 Issues

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Slender
Posts: 1234
Joined: 25 Jan 2020, 17:55

Re: Counter-Strike 2 Issues

Post by Slender » 22 Jan 2025, 09:04

joseph_from_pilsen wrote:
21 Jan 2025, 21:23
I made a small test
lap is connected to socet when test?
lap is connected to wifi / lan?
can you try test with / without power cord and with / without lan?

joseph_from_pilsen
Posts: 218
Joined: 01 Apr 2022, 23:51

Re: Counter-Strike 2 Issues

Post by joseph_from_pilsen » 24 Jan 2025, 21:49

So there is a new issue.
Previous issue with frametimes and FPS which made game almost unplayable at my laptop and friends desktop, was silently fixed by a patch previous days (22/1/2025 afaik). 8 hours after i complained, interesting...

But cs2 never disappoints, actually there is a new issue, it behaves SIMILAR to the old issue - game generates frametime spikes and hard freezes during them, but the source is now DIFFERENT (thats probably the point why the game engine is named SOURCE 2 - means 2 different sources of lag). ¨

(copied from youtube description:)
Its not computer issue actually, its networking issue, probably steam routing (seems to be Vienna node):
Actually last 24 hours the issue is following: (at least from my location - Czechia, happens to my friends too - edit: confirmed also from Austria by 2 other people) the game freezes every 5-10 seconds because there are hard 30ms lags. The game completely loses connection for about 30ms during the framespike and hard freezes so you cant do anything for about a fraction of second and you get teleported and aim punched by lag because the client resynces after 2 ticks passed without getting any info about them + CPU is desperately trying to compute what happened during the microdisconnect.
The reason is that something on the route between valve servers (happens to more of them, its probably steam networking related or some big international provider) simply stops transferring data for about 30 miliseconds. Jitter graph will show huge spike but its not a true jitter spike, its hard disconnect so the impact is insane (frametime goes to 30+ms and game stutters and teleports you).
Happens at all official servers in all modes (no matter which one). Seems to be not detectable by pingplotter (its interval is once per second but the lag takes only about 30ms).

Short demonstration here (2am so it has nothing to do with network congestion, the game was unplayable whole day). Btw even outside freezespikes, the aim is heavy as fu..k at 7800X3D,4070S. At 3rd party server (i tested xplay.gg) the mouse gets leightweight instantly and framespikes are nearly non existing.

https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8 (playing from bed btw)

freeze times:

https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8?t=21 (double freeze)
https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8?t=52
https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8?t=61
https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8?t=69
https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8?t=86

Client fps also tank extremelly because CPU desperately tries to compute missing informations. At weaker laptop the freezes are almost twice so long.

Lev1n
Posts: 66
Joined: 17 Apr 2023, 05:40

Re: Counter-Strike 2 Issues

Post by Lev1n » 26 Jan 2025, 07:02

what should i understand from this?
https://imgur.com/evgZdFK

spkii
Posts: 74
Joined: 27 Oct 2020, 19:59

Re: Counter-Strike 2 Issues

Post by spkii » 26 Jan 2025, 08:40

joseph_from_pilsen wrote:
24 Jan 2025, 21:49
So there is a new issue.
Previous issue with frametimes and FPS which made game almost unplayable at my laptop and friends desktop, was silently fixed by a patch previous days (22/1/2025 afaik). 8 hours after i complained, interesting...

But cs2 never disappoints, actually there is a new issue, it behaves SIMILAR to the old issue - game generates frametime spikes and hard freezes during them, but the source is now DIFFERENT (thats probably the point why the game engine is named SOURCE 2 - means 2 different sources of lag). ¨

(copied from youtube description:)
Its not computer issue actually, its networking issue, probably steam routing (seems to be Vienna node):
Actually last 24 hours the issue is following: (at least from my location - Czechia, happens to my friends too - edit: confirmed also from Austria by 2 other people) the game freezes every 5-10 seconds because there are hard 30ms lags. The game completely loses connection for about 30ms during the framespike and hard freezes so you cant do anything for about a fraction of second and you get teleported and aim punched by lag because the client resynces after 2 ticks passed without getting any info about them + CPU is desperately trying to compute what happened during the microdisconnect.
The reason is that something on the route between valve servers (happens to more of them, its probably steam networking related or some big international provider) simply stops transferring data for about 30 miliseconds. Jitter graph will show huge spike but its not a true jitter spike, its hard disconnect so the impact is insane (frametime goes to 30+ms and game stutters and teleports you).
Happens at all official servers in all modes (no matter which one). Seems to be not detectable by pingplotter (its interval is once per second but the lag takes only about 30ms).

Short demonstration here (2am so it has nothing to do with network congestion, the game was unplayable whole day). Btw even outside freezespikes, the aim is heavy as fu..k at 7800X3D,4070S. At 3rd party server (i tested xplay.gg) the mouse gets leightweight instantly and framespikes are nearly non existing.

https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8 (playing from bed btw)

freeze times:

https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8?t=21 (double freeze)
https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8?t=52
https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8?t=61
https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8?t=69
https://youtu.be/fPuxSGESGk8?t=86

Client fps also tank extremelly because CPU desperately tries to compute missing informations. At weaker laptop the freezes are almost twice so long.
So true youre saying there. I every time feel the micro freeze second, that changes sens and mouse feeling on CS2.

joseph_from_pilsen
Posts: 218
Joined: 01 Apr 2022, 23:51

Re: Counter-Strike 2 Issues

Post by joseph_from_pilsen » 27 Jan 2025, 18:05

Lev1n wrote:
26 Jan 2025, 07:02
what should i understand from this?
https://imgur.com/evgZdFK
CS2 uses 1300MTU limit (or at least internet is saying that), so 1492 is fine. Otherwise it says nearly nothing... (Except the year of discovering Murica lol)

joseph_from_pilsen
Posts: 218
Joined: 01 Apr 2022, 23:51

Re: Counter-Strike 2 Issues

Post by joseph_from_pilsen » 29 Jan 2025, 21:16

So... i have found the probable source of the CS2 lag, its really network sided. Its caused either by one of biggest central european peering datacenters - peering.cz or just only one or more of partner networks.
I found it accidentally when i realized that i get microfreezes only at servers which route trough peering.cz but no lag to servers which dont go this way. I also flooded my ISP infrastructure as far away as possible and as much as possible and no pings dropped even if i have set 10ms interval between them. So this wasnt the source.

Issues ingame were reported by some czechs, germans (biggest hit happened at 4am 2 days ago, i had freezes and the whole opponent german premade too, at 4am...) , slovaks and one vienna austrian player. And voala, guess where peering.cz operates. In Czechia, Southern Germany, Slovakia and Vienna in Austria.

The problem still persists, here is the recording of lags tonight. At epiczone.sk which is routed out of peering.cz there is no lag all the time, at xplay.gg it freezes hard. I didnt record valve official where it lagged the most as i was really tired this time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnwtgEQG3g8

spkii
Posts: 74
Joined: 27 Oct 2020, 19:59

Re: Counter-Strike 2 Issues

Post by spkii » 30 Jan 2025, 04:09

joseph_from_pilsen wrote:
29 Jan 2025, 21:16
So... i have found the probable source of the CS2 lag, its really network sided. Its caused either by one of biggest central european peering datacenters - peering.cz or just only one or more of partner networks.
I found it accidentally when i realized that i get microfreezes only at servers which route trough peering.cz but no lag to servers which dont go this way. I also flooded my ISP infrastructure as far away as possible and as much as possible and no pings dropped even if i have set 10ms interval between them. So this wasnt the source.

Issues ingame were reported by some czechs, germans (biggest hit happened at 4am 2 days ago, i had freezes and the whole opponent german premade too, at 4am...) , slovaks and one vienna austrian player. And voala, guess where peering.cz operates. In Czechia, Southern Germany, Slovakia and Vienna in Austria.

The problem still persists, here is the recording of lags tonight. At epiczone.sk which is routed out of peering.cz there is no lag all the time, at xplay.gg it freezes hard. I didnt record valve official where it lagged the most as i was really tired this time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnwtgEQG3g8
Then? we dont have solution... :S

joseph_from_pilsen
Posts: 218
Joined: 01 Apr 2022, 23:51

Re: Counter-Strike 2 Issues

Post by joseph_from_pilsen » 30 Jan 2025, 14:28

Then... Now i need to find the exact node which does the lags, without it its pointless to try to complain anywhere because typical behavior of these companies is denying any issue until its undeniable...

To not make things easy, the lags are 2 of kinds. One is caused by freezes/loss at optical network, second one is caused by a gameserver. They both do the same thing! - They both freeze the client and cause a jitter, choppiness and fps drop. The only difference is that any server sided lag which is above 15ms threshold is always followed by a red error sign "slow server frame + time in ms". But only for really huge lags activating the 15ms threshold for showing the lag. If the server is lagging only a bit, the threshold is not met and no error shown no matter that the game runs jittery but valve obfuscated it below 15ms unlike csgo where you could see the server parameters in netgraph (from obvious but fraudulent reason - it would be obvious that any server is lagging to some extent).
Btw this behavior happened even in csgo, but not with such huge impact, at servers with poor performance the game had noticably less fps in client and was running crappier.

So the testing must be done at 3am and im not gonna to do it these days, next week im moving to a location with different fibre internet connection not going trough this huge network (with 4-6Tbit peak load) and i will see how it will behave there. Then i will continue with research if some miracle doesnt happen and someone notices and fixes it before (which i doubt because classic icmp based monitoring systems will notice only VERY slight loss and nobody would care as the chance to meet the timing of 20ms long lags with icmp requests in relatively long intervals above 100ms, but usually 500 or even 1000ms is very low so they will find only 3 lost pings of 10000 and not give a f...k). And its very probable that its only something on the way to valve peering which is broken (valve has its own direct connection to the peering network) so other games and quality requiring services probably run with no issues even here (= except few local cs2 players nobody else will be complaining and cs2 is so broken game with so many sources of lag that nobody will give it any importance).

Time will tell.

Future
Posts: 75
Joined: 06 Dec 2022, 07:04

Re: Counter-Strike 2 Issues

Post by Future » 30 Jan 2025, 15:41

joseph_from_pilsen wrote:
30 Jan 2025, 14:28
Then... Now i need to find the exact node which does the lags, without it its pointless to try to complain anywhere because typical behavior of these companies is denying any issue until its undeniable...

To not make things easy, the lags are 2 of kinds. One is caused by freezes/loss at optical network, second one is caused by a gameserver. They both do the same thing! - They both freeze the client and cause a jitter, choppiness and fps drop. The only difference is that any server sided lag which is above 15ms threshold is always followed by a red error sign "slow server frame + time in ms". But only for really huge lags activating the 15ms threshold for showing the lag. If the server is lagging only a bit, the threshold is not met and no error shown no matter that the game runs jittery but valve obfuscated it below 15ms unlike csgo where you could see the server parameters in netgraph (from obvious but fraudulent reason - it would be obvious that any server is lagging to some extent).
Btw this behavior happened even in csgo, but not with such huge impact, at servers with poor performance the game had noticably less fps in client and was running crappier.

So the testing must be done at 3am and im not gonna to do it these days, next week im moving to a location with different fibre internet connection not going trough this huge network (with 4-6Tbit peak load) and i will see how it will behave there. Then i will continue with research if some miracle doesnt happen and someone notices and fixes it before (which i doubt because classic icmp based monitoring systems will notice only VERY slight loss and nobody would care as the chance to meet the timing of 20ms long lags with icmp requests in relatively long intervals above 100ms, but usually 500 or even 1000ms is very low so they will find only 3 lost pings of 10000 and not give a f...k). And its very probable that its only something on the way to valve peering which is broken (valve has its own direct connection to the peering network) so other games and quality requiring services probably run with no issues even here (= except few local cs2 players nobody else will be complaining and cs2 is so broken game with so many sources of lag that nobody will give it any importance).

Time will tell.
Download WinMTR and test, some of your HOPs must be failing somewhere down the trace.

joseph_from_pilsen
Posts: 218
Joined: 01 Apr 2022, 23:51

Re: Counter-Strike 2 Issues

Post by joseph_from_pilsen » 30 Jan 2025, 15:56

IF it were so easy... These diagnostic tools are using only long interval request once or twice per second what is absolutelly useless in this case. And spamming icmp request 100x in a second only leads to rejecting requests from the node as pinging so often triggers the anti-ddos filter.

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