ChristophSmaul1337 wrote: ↑11 Feb 2024, 21:21Good day, dear reader. After years upon years lurking around the internet and this forum, I thought it was finally time for me to make an account and voice my opinion, and share my experience. Warning, this is going to be a lot of text! Also, please excuse my English as I am not a native speaker.
TL;DR: There is no fix in here. It's just my experience with desync, bad hitreg and all the "good stuff" that people regularly talk about.
I started to play FPS games when I was 8 years old. My first game was Counter Strike Source, which I started playing in mid-2005. After grinding that game for thousands of hours, I picked up other FPS titles like Battlefield. I extensively played BFBC2 and went on to become Top 10 in ESL’s EU leaderboards in Battlefield 3. While enjoying BF3, I also transitioned to Counter Strike Global Offensive when it came out in 2012, grinding Faceit and even reaching Level 10 at some point. Including my old hacked steam account I have amassed more than 20.000 hours across both CS:S and CS:GO, more than 10.000 hours in Battlefield 3, with another 5.000 hours in all other BF installations. As you can tell form these numbers, I enjoyed playing competitive games A LOT. It was my favourite thing to do, period. Nothing came close and it was the best thing ever.
Starting at around 2018, everything began to change for the worse and every game became gradually more desynced, eventually culminating into today where any competitive game is completely unplayable. While before 2018, every Battlefield game after BF3 was a complete joke, CS becoming more and more infested with cheaters and a general lack of good, solid and skill-based shooter games was a problem in and of itself, the added agony from desync problems started to really deteriorate me from touching competitive games ever again. More and more did I realize that something is seriously wrong.
Fast forward to today, I have admitted defeat. Reading this forum, and many other forums including every reply in the “Mouse lag is killing me” thread over at NVIDIA’s forum, trying most of the suggested solutions along the way with nothing helping, I must accept that there will never be a fix for this problem and that the root cause of all of this must lie out of anybody’s control.
Nonetheless, I want to share my thoughts about these problems with you, because sometimes even the simplest ideas could spark a new idea in somebody’s mind.
Starting with the obvious, I am a computer guy. I know my way around hardware, BIOS and all its settings, I am familiar with Windows and Linux, and I have built at least 100 computers for friends and family so far.
I was born into a very wealthy family, so I always had the luck of owning the latest and greatest hardware available at the time, until I stopped yearly upgrading my setup when problems were starting to frustrate me. No matter the hardware I used, before 2018, everything was running smoothly, and I cannot recall any point in time where I was thinking “something isn’t right here”. All problems started occurring slowly but surely. It wasn’t something that happened when I bought a new computer, but rather happened “out of thin air”. Apart of family members dying left, right and centre, nothing ever changed in my household, from all the way back in 2005. Same house, same electrical installation, same room, same everything. I’ll address this later in more detail. The only “moving part” was the annual PC upgrade, which before 2018 never posed a problem.
Before reading anything on the internet at all, I remember thinking about this for myself and concluding that my horrible internet connection must be at fault. At the time of the first problems occurring, I had an ADSL connection with a DSL6.000 contract from my ISP, Deutsche Telekom. While the contract promised “up to” 6.000 Kbit/s downstream, the realistic, average throughput was more in the region of about 1.000 Kbit/s. We had this contract for years already at the time, as nothing better was available. My conclusion was that they somehow must have changed something in their infrastructure, the routing or they have simply oversubscribed the area, though that seemed unlikely since I live in an extremely tiny village with less than 100 inhabitants, most of them being elderly people who don’t use the internet much, and nobody was moving in/out at the time.
As time went on, it became even clearer to me that my ISP cannot be at fault. I did several tests to prove that they have messed something up so I could contact them and ask for them to fix it. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find anything that would be out of the ordinary. It started with simple traceroutes, Pingplotter traces and Wireshark captures. As nothing seemed wrong, I rented a server in the Frankfurt datacentre, where most game servers I play on are located at. Conducting several tests with said server likewise revealed no anomalies but rather showed that the connection was as good as it gets from an online gaming perspective. A long-time friend with a network engineering degree aided me at looked at the results and he concluded the same. To get around possible routing hiccups, I even subscribed to a multitude of VPNs, all of them without any impact towards the problem.
At the time of these tests, I still had contact with someone I knew from school who lived in a very crowded area. Not only was the city a lot bigger, he also still had a slow ADSL connection and was living in an apartment complex with at least 30 more inhabitants. I set out to visit him and conduct some more internet related tests on his computer. From the school days I knew that games on his computer would run flawlessly because I have played at his house numerous times.
Apart from a slightly worse ping, his results were basically a copy of mine, which made sense because he was on an ADSL connection and with the same ISP, too. This ruled out the possibility of this being an internet issue once and for all. Also, I closely inspected his computer and his overall setup. Him not being as lucky as me, he only had a mid-range computer for it’s time. His router was the ISP’s default router, it wasn’t taken care of in a particular good way but rather was thrown behind his couch with little to no ventilation. He ran a 20m unshielded CAT5 cable from the router to his PC, the cable’s isolation was damaged at one point. Nothing about his setup was “optimized” in any way.
Over the next days my objective shifted towards ordering his exact PC parts, including peripherals, the monitor, and the router he was using, and even the 20m Ethernet cable. As I built a copy of his exact setup, the problems didn’t go away but felt even worse, probably caused by a lower framerate and the lower monitor refresh rate than I was used to. After this test failing, I donated the computer to another friend. To make everything even worse, I went on to play on that setup at his house, and everything felt fantastic again.
This was the point where I began to search the internet for this problem as I could not comprehend what was happening. Electricity came up as suggestion, so I decided to start with the most logical step and call an electrician to look if anything is out of the ordinary. The house I live in was built in 1967 but has a “modern, up to date installation”, according to the electrician. To make sure he was competent, I called 2 more electricians, and they all said the same thing. I even had them come around the entire house and check every outlet for proper grounding, and general conformity with the national electric code. I explicitly told all of them about these problems and they independently conducted several measurements, all giving excellent results. None of the three could explain my problems, from the electricians’ point of view.
Even though this was already cause enough for me to believe that electricity could not have any impact, I still went on to order a double conversion online UPS and an isolation transformer to make extra sure. And, as expected, neither made a difference at all. The last step was to try my setup somewhere else. To get buttery-smooth, flawless gameplay I didn’t have to look far, as my neighbour one street down is my mother. When I tried to move my setup to her house, everything was perfect again. This was the final piece of evidence I needed to confirm that the problem is neither related to the ISP nor electricity. If oversubscriptions would be the cause, I must’ve felt the same desync at my mother’s house too, as it is located inside the same village, just one street further down. Same with electricity.
Being completely out of options, I started to try some BIOS and Windows related fixes. These changed nothing, as I would have expected. Becoming more and more desperate, I eventually tried almost everything over the last few years regarding settings and BIOS options, to no avail. Really the only thing I haven’t done at this point is moving house, since that would not be practical. I own this house and the associated property.
At around this time I was completely deflated and didn’t even want to try anything more. No real solution was in sight, no fix was available and even the internet speed was too low to at least enjoy some YouTube or Twitch at the time. I began an apprenticeship just for the sake of it and I didn’t game on my computer for the better part of a year.
In 2020, the unthinkable happened. Germany is known to be a third world country when it comes to digital infrastructure, so I accepted early on that I will likely never have access to any kind of fast internet. Until suddenly, a “Deutsche Telekom” worker knocked at the door and offered a new fibre connection to be installed “this year” (2020) for free as part of some European Union funded infrastructural project. I signed that document faster than he could finish the sentence and despite some minor delays, the new fibre connection went live in February 2021. This was the last hope, I was preparing by upgrading my PC one last time. This surely would fix the problem, right? A nice, low-latency gigabit fibre optic connection is what every gamer dreams of, right? Wrong. Nothing changed apart from the ping going down from ~20ms to ~5ms. Again, I rented a server in Frankfurt and did the same tests as before. Same result, even better this time due to the drastically lower ping. Yet desync is on an all-time high to the point where I cannot even see people that allegedly kill me. Bullets pass through people more than ever before, shooting somebody in any FPS game is almost impossible.
And here we are. Threads about this pop up on the internet from time to time, and despite me playing games very irregularly nowadays due to this problem, I still read most of them in a desperate hope to maybe find something that could alleviate the horror that is this problem. I so desperately wanted to become a streamer at one time because I love social interaction and I also used to love video games. It only depended on the government upgrading the internet service. But now, with this kind of problem, streaming is pointless as I cannot deliver any kind of adequate gameplay and playing any game longer than 10 minutes is infuriating to the point where I just want to break the setup and throw everything out of the window.
Most people say that this happens when you get old, the reaction time becomes slow, you become inconsistent or any other kind of thing that revolves around the “human factor”. While I am generally open to any suggestion, I think that this can be ruled out quickly because I would know when I am to blame. I have developed a deep understanding for most of the games I play, differentiating a “I f*ed up and misaimed” moment from a “I CLEARLY should’ve gotten that kill and somehow it didn’t happen” is not that hard for me. I know when I had time to react but didn’t shoot in time, I know when I landed the first headshot but it didn’t register, I know when I spray 30 bullets into somebody in Battlefield from a few metres away yet he still doesn’t die. I know when people who kill me aren’t even on my screen while I get asked if I am asleep by my friend, who’s spectating me.
I have read that there can be a discrepancy in how you perceive situations when playing and spectating, but my friend laughing at me for not reacting to somebody who is allegedly on my screen for seconds while I can – at the best of times – see nothing but a few pixels of a shoulder cannot possibly be explained by us having a different perception of the same situation. I do understand that humans can be inconsistent and that your performance can vary greatly, depending on the amount and quality of sleep, what you had to eat etc. But I am very sure that you don’t go from curb stomping a Faceit 10 lobby to the point where they call cheats, to bottom fragging against silvers within a matter of minutes (this has happened before). And this behaviour is present across any game I play.
A final thought on lots of threads I read on here. Most of the time, desync and input lag problems go hand in hand and if you have one, you have the other as well. But for me, I do not feel that much input lag at all, I don’t think my mouse is behaving weirdly or that anything else is amiss. The only exception is Rocket League, where I have lots in input lag when using a controller. That is a game-specific thing though I feel. For me, it really is only about desync and not being able to react to anything happening as well as having horrendous hit detection problems in virtually every game I try to play.
If you have made it this far into this wall of text, thank you for reading all of it. Maybe this has given you or someone else yet another idea about what the problem could be. If anything, it is another count on the list of people who stand defeated by whatever this stupid problem is. I have my fingers crossed for everybody who suffers from this and I hope that a solution, or at least a workaround, can be found in a timely manner.
Hello how are you, I have been in this situation since 2010 or 2011, and till a point my game stuttering even by having nice temperatures , zero throttling, low latency, super tweaked system, tweaks reverted, hundred installations of OS, bios tweaking, modded bios(not advisable to do) hundred of hours invested in understand, doing research, opening multiples threads at github, guru3d, steam, tomshardware, you named it. also from commenting the old topic made back in 2009 in steam: (CS isn't smooth) that's where all beging then it spreads to Nvidia forums, toms hardware, github, here, etc.etc
Lastly but not least, what I learn is that, you need more competent electrician, not the regulars one, the one who specialize also in (harmony distortion)<-- this is what break o cause this weird sensation of monitor or games feeling like 30 frames per second even at 100+. Also i don't know if this happens to you, but my eyes seems to lost the track of my character in game, when I get into few monsters this never happened before, is like I don't feel in the game as I used to be, i don't feel immerse, I get tired watching the screen, and is not even fast motion games, happens with old games like tibia or ravendawn, the game looks more blurry than usual, (and nope is not blur motion nor antialising,) I'm 100% sure that this is harmony distortion my father explained to me. but yeah I'm from Venezuela situation is hard here, so I don't have the money to invest to fix my problem
TLTRD: Problem is Harmony Distortion. <-- and this is a very complex topic.
Sorry for my ugly English/grammar.
Hope this helps
, or if its only something related with Windows? or the electricity or the harmony distortion, or our brains?
