Gaming VPN Experiences Thread [Help Internet Lag]

[dervu]

You can check that with iperf3. No out of order packets at LAN or to host in another country. Would be good to check on routers to most popular servers, or at least lease server at same place game servers are hosted and try there.

[diakou]

More on the out of order packets issue, which looks more and more like the root cause behind everything and ISP's network resilience, devices & configuration being the main culprit behind poor UDP packet handling:

• "Out of Order Packets" thread @ reddit

...
Essentially this is packet loss, even though the game does not alert the user of the issue (packet loss indicator) and there is no way to diagnose this problem as of right now. Packet loss or extensive out of order packets would result in degraded simulation accuracy and make it very difficult for people to predict where people are going, register shots, and otherwise participate in a real time fashion. This doesn't just effect Fortnite, it effects all games and how extensive depends on the engine and the netcode. I did not know this was a huge issue, but apparently it is.

Currently there does not seem to be any sort of ways of diagnosing this.
...

• "Valid reasons for out-of-order packets?" thread @ reddit

• "Why Can Some Advanced Ethernet NICs Cause Packet Reordering?"

• "Sorting Reordered Packets with Interrupt Coalescing"

• "Turtles on the wire: understanding how the OS uses the modern NIC"

Having studied fighting game netcode extensively (and by proxy - anything that has to do with netcode) these were some incredibly good links. Thank you for sharing these!

[Xen0m]

I did it few times and it was for the best once you find good server.
Most of the time i was getting some saturated routing from my ISP that my private VPN instantely solved (no more packet loss & ping issues)
But it requires some time to set up it well then i come to only 1 ms more than my best ping on nearest servers.

[Chief Blur Buster]

guys has someone of you experience with buy vps + run vpn on it ?
that probably better than all this gaming vpn's or i'm thinking wrong ?

Can be. Not always. Yes and no. Location dependant. VPN dependant. VPS dependant.

It depends on location of VPN versus location of VPS.
And the routing of gaming VPN versus routing of your VPS.
Bandwidth.
Type of VPN.
Premium VPN service (paying for faster commercial VPN).
CPU allotment of VPN vs VPS
Etc.

Cherrypicking will sometimes help better than "dedicated VPN" vs "VPN-over-VPS" -- just remember you have to pony up either way (don't use a free VPN or a plain VPN-for-Netflix, which are slower/laggier. You want a high performance low-jitter VPN)

Some cheap discount VPS web servers are throttled in network performance. Whether limited to 10 Mbps per connection or 100 Mbps rather than full speed 1 gigabit Ethernet or 10 gigabit Ethernet. Cheap VPS servers can be a bit heavily shared on crappy data center infrastructure that's slower than some of the best high end commercial performance-optimized VPNs. So sometimes better to pay the same amount of money for a top-of-the-line premium VPN (upgraded premium bandwidth and lower latency etc), for the same money you pay a VPS. But a good, well-selected dedicated server on a fast Ethernet port, in a carefully cherrypicked location that gives you better routing, then.... yes.

A good dedicated server with 1 gigabit Ethernet, via a WireGuard-based VPN can easily saturate 1 gigabit per second and add only 0.6ms to 1.5ms of VPN-derived encryption latency which can easily be made up with much better Internet routing.

Regardless of what you roll (dedicated VPN provider, or VPN-on-VPS, etc), try your damndest to use the WireGuard VPN protocol instead of OpenVPN or IPsec, especially maximum likelihood of VPN-helping-you (low VPN overhead + largest odds of improved gaming from better routing).

The new WireGuard VPN protocol is almost always much better for gaming VPNs than OpenVPN and IPSec. It is such a lightweight VPN that can feels like there's no VPN at all. Bam, easy to saterate 110 megaBYTES/sec for transfers on a gigabit Ethernet, for a symmetrical gigabit-to-gigabit FTTH-to-FTTH VPN, if both endpoints are fast -- you essentially get practically the same speeds VPN and non-VPN with WireGuard between the same two endpoints. WireGuard is great for "what VPN?" near zero overhead VPN. It feels like no overheads are being added.

For those under a rock, the new WireGuard VPN protocol uses only 1/100th the source code of OpenVPN, pretty much a straight-to-the-metal VPN. Since 2019, it has revolutionized zero-slowdown VPN.

WireGuard is the new defacto go-to nowadays for gaming VPNs. Most good gaming VPNs now has added the WireGuard protocol option in addition to existing OpenVPN/IPsec. WireGuard also uses UDP tunnelling for both UDP and TCP/IP, so it's a great fit for gaming VPNs.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Thinking....

New Little-Known CloudFlare WARP+ VPN as Dream Gaming VPN?

(The one with the plus sign, not just "WARP")

Some relevant VPN experience/ideas:

Recently (2019), CloudFlare began building a new Internet backbone of sorts (called Argo). I've already upgraded Blur Busters to use this backbone. If Blur Busters runs faster in year 2021, you can thank this backbone.

One thing is that Blur Busters recently did was upgrading all our web infrastructure to sometimes dynamically run over CloudFlare's paid 79 terabits/sec backbone (Argo). So Blur Busters now pays hundreds per month for CloudFlare (DDoS protection + massive performance increase + upgraded CDN features). Which means Blur Busters websites now runs faster, with large amounts of distributed caching worldwide -- overseas visitors have noticed that Forums and TestUFO now runs more than 2x faster for example. And scales better to traffic surges. Blur Busters can now support over 100x+ more web visitor surge (above average) -- without error pages, essentially mostly surge-proofing, DDoS-proofing and Reddit-proofing this server (for the most part) since CloudFlare also acts as a DDoS/bot/hacker firewall.

(That said, CloudFlare sometimes is a bit too protective -- captcha pages -- so please inform me if you're getting CloudFlare messages)

This is relevant for gaming, because CloudFlare is currently working on a new ultra-low-latency paid VPN service called WARP+ (The one with the plus sign, not the free WARP service for mobiles).

What I have learned is that CloudFlare now is offering VPN service. Now I put two and two together -- new backbone, new VPN. I wonder if they might be a good gaming VPN, at least for locations close to CloudFlare POPs...?

I need to test the CloudFlare "WARP+" paid VPN:

Based on my Blur Busters speedup experience, it might be the dream gaming VPN for endpoints near CloudFlare POPs (Point of Prescences). This little known gem of a potentially good VPN to try would be the CloudFlare Teams Enterprise ($14/mo) with customizable worldwide network routing (editable IP network locations!) with the brand new WARP+ paid VPN service -- a WireGuard VPN running over CloudFlare's ~80 terabit/sec "Argo" backbone. It may be worthwhile to test out WARP+ sometime (it's based off WireGuard) because the CloudFlare backbone is over 100x bigger than the major VPN providers, and while WARP+ would be one semi-expensive VPN (pay-per-gigabyte), it would go over one of the world's fastest low-latency Internet backbones.

Skip the free CloudFlare VPN stuff though for latency-critical applications, while it might work better than an average VPN, I find CloudFlare performance is much better when paid.

[triplese]

Testing VPNs in csgo. WTFast is really WTF. My ping is stable 54ms, but I got 150+ and different region. Completely fucks up routing.

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