Does "packet bunching" affect FPS game's netcode integrity

[bababy]

I’m not a network engineer or anything, but I’ve been trying to figure out why my game feels bad so since after 2023 even though my in-game internet looks perfect (too good to be true, honestly). I ran Wireshark and discovered this: my upload pacing looks totally fine—sending packets one by one every 6-10ms but on the download side, it definitely not sending them back one at a time. It looks like 3 packets are being dumped at once (the gap between them is less than 0.1ms). Then there’s just 20ms of nothing. Then 3 more packets.

My theory is that the ISP is using some packet coalescing algorithm to handle all the bandwidth traffic without overloading their hardware. It keeps the basic stats looking clean (i don't know how), but it actually wrecks the netcode and all the tweaking people do with RAM timings, MSI mode is just trying to affect the engine interpolate an internet connection that's already messed up. Sometimes it gets better, sometimes worse. That explains the inconsistency.

Another reason why I think of this theory is just by comparing it to how things used to be. Before 2023, my ping was around 50ms and wasn't that stable—I'd get 1-5ms of jitter and maybe 0-5% loss. But the game actually felt good and those stats felt real, unlike the fake feeling i get now it is like playing on 200ms with 50% loss, kinda over exaggerated but you get what i mean. Plus, in my country, 150Mbps used to be the common but now 1Gbps is everywhere for the price of 150Mbps. I highly doubt the actual ISP hardware caught up that fast. They must have been relying on some kind of algorithm to handle the massive explosion of TikTok and 4K streaming since the pandemic. Maybe they know it fucks up FPS games and choose to hide it or maybe they just don't.

[DudeBeFishing]

Is that every download packet or just the game server packets? If it's just the game server, you're most likely seeing the server tickrate.

[readtext]

capture the packets with your router and check it there