[Ethernet Onboard-vs-USB-vs-PCIe] I finally found the reason behind my input lag after 6 years

[woodyfly]

[moderation: removed "problem will be back". Such parrot comments are discouraged in these forums]

[f1ndus]

sorry, all what u tried and spent money to it, u never tried play without ethernet cable plugged in? ,, this thing i tried 5 years ago, even playing on WIFI, buy usb wifi adapter and try, phone hotspot or local internet connection, all is the same

[6yToFindTheAnswer]

Thank you guys for all your replies. I appreciate it

Now find another person with same motherboard and same LAN chipset and ask them if they have such issue.
Maybe that would give another perspective on your issue.
Also you can try PCI-E ethernet adapter.

Good idea, will do. Any PCI-E ethernet card to recommend?

You are either lucky that its the reason or its a placebo. I also have Intel network chipset and there is no different with Ethernet cable plugged or unplugged. I even tried 4 different motherboard brands with different chipsets, same thing all the time.

Definitely not placebo. It happens in-game but also on desktop. Did you, by any chance, tried a mobo with Z270 chipset or with the intel I219-V network chip? Maybe it could be related to that intel chip in particular and not be a generality.

so for how long are you using the realtek one now?

more than 10 days and i keep doing A / B testing with my main PC and same feeling everyday.

Can you install a realtek network card in the new pc? it must be found

any card recommendation? I could definitely try that, yes.

[...] ... Since your game work on diferent PC outside your place there is no fix at your home right?
Anything new connected to the PC increase capacitance and that will improve your input lag for limited time….

No no no I took this old OEM pc from my office and plugged everything at home, wanted to try with the same router and ethernet cable you know?

I have realtek network chipset (x570 tomahawk) i have still lag nt.

What do you mean? Same as me? If you unplug your ethernet cable; everything becomes better?

Depends.

I've seen good LTE networks outperform bad WiFi networks.

A couple of people posted here in the past, that mentioned their LTE signal produced better competitive performance than their FTTH connection.

This is possibly because of bad network routing. Or other weirdness such as lag-compensation playing-field-levelling algorithms that somehow overseverely penalized low-ping players. Or gave an unusually low handicap for a user who was detected to be using LTE, but the person was using an average-LTE connection, etc. All kind of weird black-box algorithms in netcode.

Try ALL of the Internet connections you have, even LTE.

Definitely could be that.

I tried literally everything. Every ISP in my country and I also tried different technologies like VDSL2+, coax, and FTTH.

Coax was not bad but the ISP had a desync issue (in my area); but good enough speed.
VDSL2 being the worst, it was stable (very low jitter in download) and but had insanely high ping jitter in upload? Never really understood why.
Best overall being the FTTH, which i currently use.

Also, I am currently using the Same ISP as ScreaM (ex legend of CSGO) and Valorant pro. We live literally in the same area

You can use USB tethering with your wifisignal btw, no need to use LTE4g connection.

Just pointing it out incase you are still playing like this.

I would love to try that but my PC is at the 2nd floor and my modem/router are at the first floor; too far apart to use a USB cable.

[MegaMelmek]

No no no I took this old OEM pc from my office and plugged everything at home, wanted to try with the same router and ethernet cable you know?

If you say so then i can say its just old components robustnes if you know what i mean because thats what i am looking for… My issue looks exactly like your and it statt in one day i bough new PC went form I7 7700, Z270 tomahawk (no issue there one bit) to new PC there is no point to say what they are…

[g00d8y3]

I have realtek network chipset (x570 tomahawk) i have still lag nt.


What do you mean? Same as me? If you unplug your ethernet cable; everything becomes better?

You wrote that you solved the problem when you used realtek chip or is it better but i have realtek i have still desync/lag etc. Your main problem Intel lan chipset.
When u unplug ethernet cable is it fix %100? i tried in csgo to unplug ethernet cable but didnt fix anything.

[TooManyPixels]

Update: Ignore this post: when I wrote it my mouse-pointer's behaviour was significantly improved compared to before I rebooted, but after a few hours it gradually regressed again

---------------------------

HOLY CRAP! THANK YOU - your talk of Intel NICs was the lead I needed to investigate things and I then found suggestions to set `DisableTaskOffload` in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8993&p=71548&hilit ... oad#p71548 - and that's eliminated about 80% of mouse pointer movement/buffer/latency/smoothness/accuracy issues for me after I've been suffering it for 3 years (I even paid $500 for an MS Support ticket and they couldn't figure it out, grrr - at least I got my money-back), while the issue isn't totally solved, this is a huge improvement.

-----

I've been experiencing this issue for the past 3 years (so for you to have 6 years, you have my sympathy) on *all* of my machines (3 self-built desktops, and my Dell XPS laptop) and I had absolutely zero hint or clue it was the Intel NICs, but indeed: all my affected machines have Intel NICs, including the Dell (and all my self-built machines also use ASUS motherboards, though the Dell one doesn't, but still has an Intel NIC).

My current machine has an Intel i225-V NIC (but in 1Gbps mode).

The reason I say it's only 80% fixed is because there's still some subtle movement issues, especially when moving the mouse at very slow speeeds right after moving it fast (like when moving fast to make a new text-selection then slowing down at the end to carefully select the last-letter of the sentance or something: at that point the pointer would start to undershoot my target, but sometimes overshoot too). I'm still investigating that.

I ran a USB+HID trace using ETW/xperf/wpa/wpr/whatever-its-called-this-year and logged some interesting Windows kernel events that _prove_ that my mouse inputs are being mishandled by the OS and the results I see in WPA when comparing traces I did before, and after, setting `DisableTaskOffload` confirm it - and the "after" results in WPA still show enough latency to matter, I'm curious what else might be causing it.

(Yes, it happens to me with many different makes and models of USB mice, regardless of the mouse's refresh-rate (I default to 500Hz tho). I bought a USB 2.0 protocol analyzer to see what was going on and saw that when my mouse cursor was undershooting my expectations that the host PC was adding delays when polling interrupt IN transfers - and I don't know why.

[timecard]

HOLY CRAP! THANK YOU - your talk of Intel NICs was the lead I needed to investigate things and I then found suggestions to set `DisableTaskOffload` in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8993&p=71548&hilit ... oad#p71548 - and that's eliminated about 80% of mouse pointer movement/buffer/latency/smoothness/accuracy issues for me after I've been suffering it for 3 years (I even paid $500 for an MS Support ticket and they couldn't figure it out, grrr - at least I got my money-back), while the issue isn't totally solved, this is a huge improvement.

Glad you found my post, btw which felt better to you DisableTaskOffload 1 (nic offloading disabled) or DisableTaskOffload 0 (nic offloading enabled).

Also if you enabled nic offloading do you have some offloads disabled large send offload (LSO), checksums, ip|tcp|udp offloads, and finally your interrupt moderation value (I recommend medium/adaptive on intel)

Can you at least share screenshots of WPA results/graphs/info, others could do the same and compare investigate further.

[Mims]

I'm new to the forum, just wanted to reply to your post about the issue that you found with intel NICs.

I have the same scenario, moved out from one house to another, replaced all of my components including monitor, mouse, keyboard outside of my PC ... Recently redid my electrical box on my new appartment, felt some improvements but still had this input lag + desync with other players in multiplayer game, getting killed without even seeing nothing...

Tried with an USB Ethernet adapter with it own network card integrated, felt directly the improvement while playing valorant, fortnite ... The issue with taking invisible shots, and feeling like people i play against are godlike player was gone ! I was finally being able to take my time while gunfighting, seeing the bullets coming toward me and being able to adjust my movement while doing so. But still have some input lag (probably because the networking isn't processed directly from the motherboard).

I have a I225-V adapter, with a motherboard Z690-a prime gaming.
The 2 other motherboard that i replaced have exactly the same NIC, plus a third one having I219-V, with the same input lag / desync issue.

[TooManyPixels]

HOLY CRAP! THANK YOU - your talk of Intel NICs was the lead I needed to investigate things and I then found suggestions to set `DisableTaskOffload` in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8993&p=71548&hilit ... oad#p71548 - and that's eliminated about 80% of mouse pointer movement/buffer/latency/smoothness/accuracy issues for me after I've been suffering it for 3 years (I even paid $500 for an MS Support ticket and they couldn't figure it out, grrr - at least I got my money-back), while the issue isn't totally solved, this is a huge improvement.

Glad you found my post, btw which felt better to you DisableTaskOffload 1 (nic offloading disabled) or DisableTaskOffload 0 (nic offloading enabled).

...unfortunately my celebration was premature. I didn't write my post above until after things seemed good for a few hours - but since I wrote that post (just 2 hours ago) things gradually got worse again and now my desktop's mouse behaves the same way it did yesterday - but it definitely was better after it rebooted.

Can you at least share screenshots of WPA results/graphs/info, others could do the same and compare investigate further.

Sure.

Clone this repo and run the `usbtrace.cmd` from an elevated command-prompt: https://github.com/microsoft/busiotools ... sb/tracing - choose USB and HID logging in the batch's menus. The generated ETL trace should contain `MouseLatency` and `MousePacketLatency` events from the `Microsoft.Windows.Win32kBase.Input` provider.

...but after that I'm stumped: I don't know how to proceed with the data. I posted a (rather rambling, I'll admit) issue to the repo seeking assistance but I doubt I'll get any there as the repo seems intended for Microsoft's hardware partners who presumably actually know and understand what they're doing far better than any of us seem to do...

https://github.com/microsoft/busiotools/issues/113

As for screenshots:

198855703-d50e707d-71a7-465f-910e-20607d1ed310.png (567.4 KiB) Viewed 5688 times

198855697-195cd177-b495-478c-980c-aea33c1fdf28.png (567.54 KiB) Viewed 5688 times

Both of those screenshots are from the same trace when I'd describe the mouse pointer behaviour as "particularly bad" - I have run traces at times when the pointer behaviour was far better, though still not perfect, (like it was 2 hours ago...) and the numbers are noticably different, such as the `CursorRenderLatency` values all being under 5 (and mostly 1).

[Patrykelele]

Depends.

I've seen good LTE networks outperform bad WiFi networks.

A couple of people posted here in the past, that mentioned their LTE signal produced better competitive performance than their FTTH connection.

This is possibly because of bad network routing. Or other weirdness such as lag-compensation playing-field-levelling algorithms that somehow overseverely penalized low-ping players. Or gave an unusually low handicap for a user who was detected to be using LTE, but the person was using an average-LTE connection, etc. All kind of weird black-box algorithms in netcode.

Try ALL of the Internet connections you have, even LTE.

You are 100% right.
I have GPON internet provided by local ISP. They are monopolists, I don't have any other company that provides good internet(10Mbs+). They are using a bunch of traffic algorithms. As you can read in their statute "In order to maintain optimal conditions for Internet access, the Operator applies traffic monitoring and traffic management measures, such as: queuing, prioritization, reservation, temporary transmission allocation, traffic transfers and avoiding congestion. These measures are applied for no longer than It is necessary. The operator allows the use of management measures traffic based on defined traffic categories only in the case of w which proves to be technically unavoidable.". It makes my game terrible. 95% people having internet with perfect speed, latency still have problems due to above algorithims.
They also use some sort of speed stabilization. doesn't mater which hour, which day the speed stay consistent and on the same perfect speed. In my case it's 300Mb/s, always the same value. I don't belive in this. They have to do some tricks...

When I use lte the game is 10 times better than on gpon.