My experience with all sorts of Problems regularly mentioned here.

[ChristophSmaul1337]

Good 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.

[d-unknown]

i'm actually experiencing the same problem with exactly the same symptoms, except that sometimes for unknown reasons , and randomly some days are way way better, i get very low desync during my gaming session, and most of times it's so bad that you've a feeling that your guns shoots marshmallows
i've also spent a good amount of money with some stuffs like power conditionner, medical grade isolation transformer, emi filters, shielded cat8 ethernet cable, shielded oxygen free copper power cords, none of these make any difference in whatever online fps game i play

BUT.. i've noticed that playing from 4pm to 7pm, it's almost good but not perfect, maybe because the network is less congested during this time range because poeple are leaving their work going to home, but even at 3am it's unplayable

[Unreazz]

Heya,

I've had the same experience as you here, but with the fact that, for me, it's clearly related to the internet or something influencing the whole thing. I also live in Germany and have a VDSL plan with Deutsche Telekom. I've taken it to the extent that even Telekom's system engineers came to my house, and I had to demonstrate it to them live. Then everything was checked multiple times, DLM was turned off at my request, and they even reset the entire DSLAM specifically for me because I asked for it.

Just to give you a brief overview, there was always an improvement for me when gaming if I changed the port and followed it up with a line reset. After that, I could play normally again for 1 - 2 days. Why this happened, I have no idea, but it definitely helped. Before, I also had a cable contract at an old address, and there were the same symptoms, which disappeared with a VPN. However, this also only worked temporarily for a while. Eventually, that stopped working too.

Regardless of who else has this problem, you can assume that it must be related to the location. Switching to fiber optics or anything else will not help, or only to a limited extent. For me, this means that all types of connections must have something in common, which is why I assume that the network node must be the problem.

No one has figured out the cause so far, and I also believe that it will never be found. The only way to break out of this vicious cycle is to move.

Good luck to you all.

[ChristophSmaul1337]

Thank you for reading through all that and leaving replies!

i've also spent a good amount of money with some stuffs like power conditionner, medical grade isolation transformer, emi filters, shielded cat8 ethernet cable, shielded oxygen free copper power cords, none of these make any difference in whatever online fps game i play

Yeah, there's still a lot of information missing in my original writeup, but I've done pretty much everything suggested on the internet by now. That also included buying a lot of items which were suggested all over the internet. Needless to say, nothing helped. It's always staying the same.

BUT.. i've noticed that playing from 4pm to 7pm, it's almost good but not perfect, maybe because the network is less congested during this time range because poeple are leaving their work going to home, but even at 3am it's unplayable

Well, lucky you I guess. This is also something I've read quite regularly, where the severity changes over the course of the day. For me, it always is the same, no matter the time or the day. But I remember it starting this way, in 2018, when all of this was starting to creep in, where I was seriously questioning myself about why I couldn't perform when playing with my teammates (at around 8pm), but when I continued playing after they went to bed (around 1AM), I would gradually become better and better, despite being tired and tilted.

I've had the same experience as you here, but with the fact that, for me, it's clearly related to the internet or something influencing the whole thing. I also live in Germany and have a VDSL plan with Deutsche Telekom. I've taken it to the extent that even Telekom's system engineers came to my house, and I had to demonstrate it to them live. Then everything was checked multiple times, DLM was turned off at my request, and they even reset the entire DSLAM specifically for me because I asked for it.

Internet was my first thought about this. But I think I can rule it out for a few reasons. In fact, before 2018, my internet would regularly fail and sometimes not come back. I had to call the hotline at least once a month because something was broken. But despite this, there weren't any problems with desync or hitreg, at least nothing more than what would be expected from the game itself. When I watch gameplay on youtube today, I always think "yeah that doesn't look anywhere close to what it would look for me". I now watch twitch streams of some Faceit Level 10 players who have half a second to react to peeks and who can just run up to someone and peek them without them being shot at. I sometimes actually laugh out loud because it's so absurd. Before 2018, none of this even crossed my mind , because what I see on these streams and videos was exactly what the games looked like for me, too. When I died in a game, I always was like "yeah that play was pretty dumb. I am retarded and didn't even anticipate this so I got caught off guard. No wonder I died!" while today it's always "well, nothing i could've done here, I had the read and opponents were coming, I held an unpredictable offangle but welp, someone killed me before he was on my screen", or "well I had all of them lined up, sprayed 20 AK bullets into someone but the game says it's 27 in 1", or any combination of those.

Regardless of who else has this problem, you can assume that it must be related to the location. Switching to fiber optics or anything else will not help, or only to a limited extent.

Absolutely my observations, too. When I move only one street down and play at my mothers' house, it's back to being "normal" and the problems are instantly gone.

No one has figured out the cause so far, and I also believe that it will never be found. The only way to break out of this vicious cycle is to move.

I came to this conclusion, too. In my case, moving even just one street would improve it, if not even solve it. But I have inherited this house and the property, and I don't really want to sell it either. It's a beautiful building, fits my needs, is spacious and overall a great place to be. I simply refuse to believe that nobody will figure this out eventually.

Thanks again everybody for joining the conversation and sharing your thoughts on this.

[dervu]

If someone from your neighborhood is powered from same transformer and you want to rule out internet completely then make LAN between houses (5GHz, wired, fiber whatever is simplest) and try to play against them without using internet at all, of course it would be best to have full server with players to have similiar situation to online, so you can make LAN party. Next step would be to drag long power extension cord and place your PC setup at their place or closest neighbor and use your power and vice versa. That would give you some idea if it is wired or over the air interference.

All relatively time consuming.

[ChristophSmaul1337]

If someone from your neighborhood is powered from same transformer and you want to rule out internet completely then make LAN between houses (5GHz, wired, fiber whatever is simplest) and try to play against them without using internet at all, of course it would be best to have full server with players to have similiar situation to online, so you can make LAN party. Next step would be to drag long power extension cord and place your PC setup at their place or closest neighbor and use your power and vice versa. That would give you some idea if it is wired or over the air interference.

I don't know that much about who is powered from which transformer, as all cables are buried in the ground here. But the village is very small (not even 100 people live here), and it's very remote. Basically, it's a giant forest in every direction for kilometers on end, with one road through it and the village in the middle of it, which has 3 streets in total with a handful of houses on each street. I would be surprised of this tiny place would be supplied by more than one transformer. Especially since I know where the transformer is located at, and it's the only one that is reasonably close.

Internet wise, i can safely say that it's not that. Most people living here are elderly, some aren't even on the internet, they didn't opt in for the fibre upgrade and are still on telephone copper lines. To add to this, all of that desync and bad hitreg stuff also happens when I disconnect my internet from my PC and play against bots. I am 99.9% sure that - at least for me - this isn't related to the internet.

If it's related to power I am not so sure, and your suggestions certainly would be good to try out. They come with significant considerations, for example the longest Ethernet cable length is 100m, which would not be long enough by far. Running power extension cords for ~300 metres from house to house I am also not so sure is a good idea in terms of safety. But maybe I'll come back to it when I have more time. I'll definitely leave an update if I ever do try that.

Thank you for adding to the discussion. I appreciate your thoughs and ideas.

[JustNumber]

Same issue here from 2017 maybe . I am living in Netherlands . For me is sometimes working almost perfect. From friday till Sunday my computer working on 50+ percent . There are hours in the weekend when it working on 70-90 percent . I play multiple games like New World, CS, WOT, BF2042, PUBG right now. I have solar panels and sometimes not always when sun is coming out then computer working better. I have also Smart meter , airco, floor heating ,filters for CO2 and other smart stupid electronics. Always when my computer working perfect i am checking voltage at home, humidity, HW info, internet connection and all data what i can get . What can i see different and always is like that when computer working perfect is CPU voltage more stable and lower , no coil whine from GPU. I have i9 13900kf , gigabyte aorus 4090 and playing on BenQ Zowie 2546k. Another finidings are when somebody take shower , boiler for heating water is working then computer working better . I have 3 phase electricity at home that is a point where i end up and searching for informations about 3 phase electricity and what can be wrong with that.

[Kvoyn0v]

I’ve been frequenting this site for a few years, tried everything. Same issues as everyone on console+PC. Finally figured out how to relax my neck and extend through thoracic spine muscles. Everything became a million times better and is staying that way. I swear our bodies affect the computers. It’s not a matter of perception or reaction time

[akylen]

Almost the same problem, here for quite a few years, I tested a lot of things on my side apart from moving house or changing ISP (although I tried in 4g router with the mobile card without result ). I have tried so many things related to the computer, the screens, the peripherals, from a logical point of view of course but I know full well that there is a problem which is very visual on the screen in how the game responds and that it doesn't come from the body or whatever some people say.

[sunrisesineast]

Same issue here from 2017 maybe . I am living in Netherlands . For me is sometimes working almost perfect. From friday till Sunday my computer working on 50+ percent . There are hours in the weekend when it working on 70-90 percent . I play multiple games like New World, CS, WOT, BF2042, PUBG right now. I have solar panels and sometimes not always when sun is coming out then computer working better. I have also Smart meter , airco, floor heating ,filters for CO2 and other smart stupid electronics. Always when my computer working perfect i am checking voltage at home, humidity, HW info, internet connection and all data what i can get . What can i see different and always is like that when computer working perfect is CPU voltage more stable and lower , no coil whine from GPU. I have i9 13900kf , gigabyte aorus 4090 and playing on BenQ Zowie 2546k. Another finidings are when somebody take shower , boiler for heating water is working then computer working better . I have 3 phase electricity at home that is a point where i end up and searching for informations about 3 phase electricity and what can be wrong with that.

I have also felt that my pc felt better when high power consuming appliances are running like the washing machine, dryer and electric stove. I live in Canada.