My experience with all sorts of Problems regularly mentioned here.

[TN_fun]

This guy reacts too aggressively to another point of view and still can't prove anything. Millions of people don't have this problem, no matter what hardware they assemble and what OS they use.

Okay, he reacts aggressively to the topic with consoles (PS5, ETC)
But why not assemble a completely new PC from popular, but inexpensive components (for example, 12400f, 7500f). Record a video from the moment of assembling the PC to installing the OS and games, post it on YouTube. Record gameplay of games, how everything works perfectly. This is the only way they can believe you. Otherwise, it's just a theory.

People already spend thousands of dollars on new components and even apartments - they don't succeed. If you are sure how to do it right - show it to people.

[Slender]

It's every persons own approach whether he wants to spend thousands to say more than "it feels wrong".
Don't put everyone in same bag. It's the same as with your videos. Someone can post differences, but you never know if they are real or just prepared bullshit. So without third party reviewing whatever it is everyone lives in their bubble.

Sold! Perfectly agree, everyone can do whatever they like or not do anything.

do you have 101% healthy system right now?
you build new system after accident?

[pracc]

UPDATE: See the newer followup post
Original post follows below:

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.

UPDATE: See the newer followup post

I am also from Germany and your age. I have these problems too, in my former parents' house where I now live alone. I didn't used to have these problems in the same house. It started when I moved back here about 6 years ago. I have been looking for a solution for years and have tried a lot. I used to play CS:Source at a very high level with players like slink and krystal. Right after my move I realized that something was wrong. Of course I don't have a solution. I've already changed cable and DSL, but that didn't help. We have fiber optics from “Deutsche Glasfaser” until mid-2025. Maybe the problem for you is that Telekom is using the same node or PoP for your village as it used to with copper.

edit: i have only just read the second section with the hx1200. But it would also make sense in my case. I once tested a 3600x processor and a fairly old graphics card, which I ran with an 850 watt power supply. So actually pretty overkill for the power required, but even that ran much much better than better hardware that requires much more power with the same 850 watt power supply. Would also support my “feeling” that new hardware was more “desynced” than older hardware. simply because they require more power?....

[Hyote]

UPDATE: See the newer followup post
Original post follows below:

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.

UPDATE: See the newer followup post

I am also from Germany and your age. I have these problems too, in my former parents' house where I now live alone. I didn't used to have these problems in the same house. It started when I moved back here about 6 years ago. I have been looking for a solution for years and have tried a lot. I used to play CS:Source at a very high level with players like slink and krystal. Right after my move I realized that something was wrong. Of course I don't have a solution. I've already changed cable and DSL, but that didn't help. We have fiber optics from “Deutsche Glasfaser” until mid-2025. Maybe the problem for you is that Telekom is using the same node or PoP for your village as it used to with copper.

edit: i have only just read the second section with the hx1200. But it would also make sense in my case. I once tested a 3600x processor and a fairly old graphics card, which I ran with an 850 watt power supply. So actually pretty overkill for the power required, but even that ran much much better than better hardware that requires much more power with the same 850 watt power supply. Would also support my “feeling” that new hardware was more “desynced” than older hardware. simply because they require more power?....

No, newer hardvare has more latency. People are going to tell you it's impossible because newer hardware = more performance = reduced latency. The architectures are the problem because whatever you do, the smoothing feeling is always going to be present.

[internetexplorer4]

UPDATE: See the newer followup post
Original post follows below:

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.

UPDATE: See the newer followup post

I am also from Germany and your age. I have these problems too, in my former parents' house where I now live alone. I didn't used to have these problems in the same house. It started when I moved back here about 6 years ago. I have been looking for a solution for years and have tried a lot. I used to play CS:Source at a very high level with players like slink and krystal. Right after my move I realized that something was wrong. Of course I don't have a solution. I've already changed cable and DSL, but that didn't help. We have fiber optics from “Deutsche Glasfaser” until mid-2025. Maybe the problem for you is that Telekom is using the same node or PoP for your village as it used to with copper.

edit: i have only just read the second section with the hx1200. But it would also make sense in my case. I once tested a 3600x processor and a fairly old graphics card, which I ran with an 850 watt power supply. So actually pretty overkill for the power required, but even that ran much much better than better hardware that requires much more power with the same 850 watt power supply. Would also support my “feeling” that new hardware was more “desynced” than older hardware. simply because they require more power?....

yes it could be because it requires more power, in my case, I had tried around 15 different pcs and 6 different laptops, all the laptops are less affected by this problem for me, it doesn't matter the specs, it could be a very cheap laptop compared to a really good pc that the laptop performs better, the problem is still there but I have less input lag, the mouse is less floaty, less ghosting etc.

I did a test showing that I have less input lag on the laptop that you can see it here viewtopic.php?p=98416#p98416

also, lot of people had results by underclocking, I never tried myself but if that actually happens it would make even more sense

in my case I could confirm that what causes the interference is my body so it has nothing to do with electricity itself but couple things like these make me think that we affect the electricity inside the device

[TN_fun]

It's every persons own approach whether he wants to spend thousands to say more than "it feels wrong".
Don't put everyone in same bag. It's the same as with your videos. Someone can post differences, but you never know if they are real or just prepared bullshit. So without third party reviewing whatever it is everyone lives in their bubble.

Sold! Perfectly agree, everyone can do whatever they like or not do anything.

do you have 101% healthy system right now?
you build new system after accident?

This guy deleted all his messages and disappeared somewhere. He also deleted all videos about this issue and his opinion from the YouTube channel.

[Slender]

It's every persons own approach whether he wants to spend thousands to say more than "it feels wrong".
Don't put everyone in same bag. It's the same as with your videos. Someone can post differences, but you never know if they are real or just prepared bullshit. So without third party reviewing whatever it is everyone lives in their bubble.

Sold! Perfectly agree, everyone can do whatever they like or not do anything.

do you have 101% healthy system right now?
you build new system after accident?

This guy deleted all his messages and disappeared somewhere. He also deleted all videos about this issue and his opinion from the YouTube channel.

sad. that was funny.

[Z3CrosS]

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[TN_fun]

Tn fun - i already explained to u, if your PS5 has same blurry image/shimmerings and popups - this ps5 is done, but you can still play on it(it will never burnout, because it became much colder, same as pcs systems with these symptoms), and this hardware will operate always the same in that state. And i gave you solution already to sell it to a man who don't care about 720p experience and what to do next: buy new monitor and new PS5 from respected shop (DNS shop is not one of them), connect it to stabilizer (stabilizer for 80$ would be perfectly fine) and DO NOT connect anything else from your old perephery even keyboard and mouse and use wifi for a week, to exclude lan connection because of Wan(believe me on ideal systems will be no difference wifi or lan speed will be awesome, same as with this damaged hardware wifi or lan work always in a same s*it way). New monitor is needed to test that your new PS5 was not sold returned/refurbeshed as new, and week is needed to see if PS5 in ideal state would have degradation or not, if not, you can connect your old monitor, but im not suggest you to do that, because what do you win if it will damage new PS5, you will sell it anyway.
So about my videos - they are not deleted, all information exist, i just correct the level of access on link, and did that for may reasons, one of them is to filtering bad trafic from men who don't want to fix anything, like super-humen-input lallgers-sectarians and thier adepts. And you are perfectly proved it - because you even could not able to find my videos, what to say about your desire to fix something. People who has huge desire and brain to understand and to fix will find it easily via google indexing Blurbuster forums and topic with my videos are second on google (which was shared here btw not by me). I included all needed information for gamers/media content in two videos, and i personally dont need this videos, i saved them only to help people because i created em for that purpose - to show and how to achieve their happy time after work with saving Ashley in true 4k experience with jitters free/correct hertz, my channel is gaming recorded on ideal PC with i/o system in ideal state, you can take each game and compare it with my recorded games on Intel 2600k CPU / Asrock Z68 Extreme7 / 1080ti Jetstream and 1600mhz DDR3 Corsair RAM / 1350watt Thermaltake PSU 80+silver (with connected 12 hhds + ssds in the same time and i recorded 4k on that 40kg machine connected just to 2 cheap AC exstenstion filters for to be able to put PC in a closet for sound-block purpose from coolers, full air machine), with your 6k Ram and 16cores CPU.

Slender if you think that's funny, you wouldn't be able to fix it in another 10 years, you would still be going on the same rake on circle (round and round).

For another people i will say short: Blurry image, shimerring objects / poping up textures / low distance draw despite any setting you apply / jitters/judders - 144 hertz feels worse than 60hertz (overall bad lod or wrong lod bias) - this systems are done, but still can be operable even for gaming but with lower quality. PC could be use as video rendering platform or/and somekind of servers.
About magnets you can put em in your arses will be same effect or even better, gasoline generators (overall satiated from electricity - lulz), solar panels, some intriguing schemes - non of this will not help. If your refregerator cooling colder or warmer, after colder after warmer - its sign of non stable device, and your next move will be replace freon or controllers, or buy new refregerator, only psycho will start to use humidifiers in local electrical substation to fix with that incorrect working device. Same as with PCs, if bullets not registering in online/offline, has wrong picture and other defects with overall perfomance, and PC works like God decide from day to day - its symptoms of malfanctionning(not correct / unstable) device and changing house/room will not solve any of this with this old device, because its damaged hardware, only you have to do things right from the start to prevent that damage to not "heal" it after with awesome electricity.

Ahh and yes, why i deleted my posts here, answer is easy - personally i dont need any of this, i decided to leave just one small post inside topic with my videos to bring clearence about name of that topic. You can do whatever you like or believe in what you like, i don't force, customer is always right after all.

Ok. I don't want to be toxic. And I understand what you're talking about. At least about how games should look, how they're supposed to work. Namely, the work of all the physics, images, etc.
In the comments, I suggested that you buy a fully functional system from the person you referred to (MiSKY). Yes, his games look perfect.
If your theory is correct, then you can fix the problem. Or will you build your own PC?

I think the thing we're talking about and which is absent on "broken" systems (let everyone remain with their own opinion, it doesn't matter if it's the place where you live or a blocked system) is the smoothness of gameplay and some "dynamics"
For example, this guy on YouTube NeatPick has a perfect system and all the games work, he has that very smoothness and "dynamics"
According to my observations, 90% of all YouTubers and streamers don't have this "dynamics"

[Z3CrosS]

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