first of all I want to thank all the people here giving their best to help each other out, a great community really.
Now I'm lurking in there's forums for a while now, but nothing could really help my case, however I could find some similarities between me and frequently posted topics.
So here's my problem:
About 2 years ago I moved away from my old home to a house just on the other side of the street in a small village(South-Germany). Around the same time my old ISP(KabelBW) got taken over by Vodafone. I also decided to upgrade my PC(specs down below) to a more modern System because I thought about streaming/video editing and my old 6700k just didn't cut it anymore in that area.
I'm mainly playing csgo and consider(ed) myself a decent player, however my performance(aim-wise) deteriorated heavily over the last 2 years. I didn't notice it at first, because while my aim subjectively got worse, I managed to improve in other aspects of the game so it kind of compensated for that.
The last few months have been horrible for me though, I'm feeling like I can't aim, make precise movements or even hit people walking through my crosshair. This bothers me especially, since that's what I used to be amazing at. It became almost impossible. People walking through my crosshair don't appear smooth, it's almost like they are teleporting, even though they aren't. It feels like a combination of micro-stuttering and micro-rubberbanding, gameplay feels like I'm on 60 Hz even though I made sure I'm playing 240hz. It became impossible to hit consecutive shots when spraying/burst-firing also. I was so frustrated about that, so I tried to find the cause for it. I came to this forum since it provided a lot of similar situations and read up on all the topics before making my own one.
As of now I don't know if it's a psychological, physiological, hardware, software/driver or internet related problem.
Psychologically I can't really say much other than I'm stable and didn't change for the past 5 years or so, but maybe I'm just overlooking something.
From a physiological perspective, I'm healthy, I do sports and my reaction time is pretty much the same as it was ever since I started testing for it 5 or 6 years ago(stable 130-160 ms depending on time of the day and caffeine input)
Hardware
Apart from the CPU/Mobo change I wrote about in the beginning my system is the same.
Current parts:
CPU: AMD 3700x(Stock speeds)
MB: MSI B450 Tomahawk Max
RAM: 2x8 G.Skill Ripjaws V, 3200MHz
Main Storage: Samsung 970 Evo NVME
GPU: MSI 1080ti Gaming X trio
PSU: Corsair RM750x
Soundcard: Xonar DGX
Connected to the router via Ethernet
Monitor: BenQ XL2546
Old parts:
CPU: Intel i7 6700k(on a stable 4.6GHz)
MB: MSI Z170a Gaming M7
Currently im thinking about switching the Mainboard/CPU for the old ones since I still have them laying around and test if there's any improvements. I'm somewhat low on time right now because of exams so I'm trying to do that as soon as they are finished.
In terms of troubleshooting the current hardware I did the following things:
1) Memtest, 8 hours, no errors
2) Different CPU Stress Tests, no crashes/freezes/overheating
3) GPU Stress tests, no crashes/freezing/overheating
4) Testing for DCP Latency, seems to be fine from what values I could find online
5) Testing Nvme, no errors, speeds are fine
6) changed all Power and Display port cables. I have a cat7 ethernet cable lying around wich I have to route and terminate, but that's for when I have enough time again.
I had an electrician come over and check the entire power distribution system in my house for faulty hardware or anomalies. According to him everything is fine.
Tested multiple mice: Zowie Ec2a, Endgamegear XM1, Finalmouse Scream One, Razer Deathadder V2, Zowie Ec2b, with all available Dpi and polling rate settings.
I'm currently using HyperX Alloy Elite Keyboard, wich feels somewhat more wonky in terms of movement than my old Cherry MXBoard 3.0, wich is weird, however I can't really use the Cherry one anymore since a few keys literally broke in half.
Internet
Right now I'm on a 200/20 plan but I'm thinking about upgrading(again for streaming/video uploads, but if I can't fix my problems it's not worth it). Generic Speedtests confirm proper speeds, I'll have to re-do the dslreports speed test, wich gave me high buffer bloat readings in some cases and very good ones in the next test.
The only hint I currently have it this readout from the csgo console after a Matchmaking game:
I'm not very knowledgeable in terms of internet, but those readouts seem rather suspicious to me, especially the high variance in packet latencies. I contacted my ISP about that but didn't get a proper answer yet.
My Router/Modem is a generic Horizon Box provided by my old ISP wich is getting pretty old and hot to the touch nowadays. I'll probably have to replace it sooner or later. When pinging it the console generally reads <1 ms or 1ms with occasional spikes every 10ish seconds to 7-20ms.
Software/Drivers
My current System runs on Win10x64 Pro and dual booting a stripped OS for gaming only. I reinstalled Windows probably a dozen times, also tried different Versions like LTSC and such. Also tried every tweak I could find, yes even the clickbait "get 1000000 more fps!!!11" ones sadly without any results.
I tested different driver versions from nvidia ranging from 34x.xx to the current 46x.xx ones. Some seem to have improved gameplay a bit, but had other issues making them not really suitable for a smooth gaming experience.
I changed any setting in bios I could find without results, so I loaded back to defaults and simply enabled xmp again.
For the Other drivers, I tried with and without chipset drivers, with and without automatic windows driver installation, installing the drivers via setup and via device manager, I don't know what else I could do here.
Where I'm at now
To be done:
- Test old mobo and cpu
- wait for ISP to give an answer on the csgo console readouts
-maybe change router(?)
I'm inclined to test Win7 since I only started using 10 after upgrading my system really and around that time the issues started occuring(although I can't say the for certain), issue being faceit anticheat doesn't allow Windows 7 anymore, so this can't be a permanent solution. (also Win7 isn't really optimized for ryzen 3xxx as far as I'm aware?)
The only other common factor is me, so either I'm going crazy or I'm getting old(maybe both?) but on some rare occasions the game feels, plays and looks just like in the good old days and everything is fine, just for the next game to be a completely shit experience again, so maybe I am indeed going crazy.
Maybe some of you guys can help me out on that one, I know troubleshooting things like this can be a long, tedious process, but I'm just out of ideas to come up with a solution by myself. I tried to provide as much information as possible, but feel free to ask in case I forgot something(wich is likely
Cheers and have a nice day!
