Finding the Source of Overwatch lag

I’ve been struggling with a great deal of lag and stuttering playing Overwatch the last few months since I picked it up again, and would like some help finding the source of the issue.
Every 10-15 seconds or so, the game freezes up for a few seconds, making it very difficult to play. I upgraded my internet speed from 100->400mb/s, and the non-frozen time playing seems to get many more hitreg’s.
PC specs are top of the line, i9/2080ti/64GB ram with games on an SSD, and the problem persists playing on both 144 and 240hz monitors with different cables.
Ping ingame varies from 55-120 typically, and hitreg % was previously increased using a VPN, but since the wifi upgrade, seems to give no further improvements.
GPU drivers are current as well.

I ran all three LookingGlass tests, and these are the results that interested me (all of it is recognized as a link, so can’t post full results):

TRACEROUTE:
5 137.221.83.84 (137.221.83.84) 406.409 ms 406.431 ms 406.438 ms
6 * * *
PING:
PING 96.39.204.190 (96.39.204.190) 56(84) bytes of data.

— 96.39.204.190 ping statistics —
4 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 3003ms
MTR:
5.|-- 137.221.83.84 0.0% 10 149.7 438.3 27.3 932.0 375.1
6.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

Any help would be appreciated, I think I’ve tried upgrading everything at this point!

1 Like

No matter how ‘good’ of a wifi setup you have, there is always a possibility of interference which causes packets to be resent due to parity check errors, which results in ping jitter and packet loss. WIFI is fine for browsing the net and checking your emails, but not ideal for real-time gaming. Your wifi setup is only as good as the weakest link. If for example you have a really good router but a crappy wifi card in your PC, it will only be as good as the crappy card in the PC.

If possible, I suggest using an ethernet cable for a direct connection from your PC to your router to identify if the wireless connection is the problem.

I do use a cat-6 connection, I used wi-fi synonymously with ‘internet service’, sorry for any confusion.

Hey there,

If you post 3 ~ marks above and below the copy paste from looking glass, it won’t post them as links and should allow you to drop the full test results here.

Keep in mind looking glass is only able to test downstream flow (from our servers to your PC.) To test upstream flow please use this winMTR test instead.

Taking a screenshot of the in-game netgraph (CTRL+SHIFT+N to open/close it) is also amazingly helpful as sometimes lag/freezing isn’t network related! Or is but in a really strange way… Either way tons of cool tools out there to help out!

If possible, could you post all 3 for me? If needed please feel free to drop them on pastebin or imgur, then reply to this forum thread with the code after the / marking. Example: If the URL is pastebin.com/abc123 we’d need the abc123 bit so we can find the file. Same goes for imgur. Either should work fine for this.

Side note, this forum is for Classic games! Our Overwatch tech support forum is located here.

Looking forward to your reply, cheers!