High Ping tied to Framerate/Causing Chop?

Hi everyone!
From time to time when my roomates are using a lot of bandwidth my ping will jump from ~40ms to upwards of ~300ms while they stream movies or w/e. Every time this occurs my frame rate is drastically affected, and in a non-linear way I don’t recall having seen outside of HOTS.
The best way I can describe this, would be to say it feels like the fames are being skipped, perhaps anywhere from 5-15 frames at a time–5 one moment, then 15 right after, its just chaotic.

Between these ‘skips’, is a relatively normal/smooth 60 fps for perhaps 1-200 frames, followed by another skip. If I were to focus on something other than my monitor, it might look like I was just getting 5-10FPS as they occur so regularly. Essentially, this is how the game plays when this is occurs, making anything other than the most basic actions virtually impossible.

As a side note I suppose it would be worth mentioning that I play on a 300 dollar Walmart laptop I bought in early 2017, albeit on the lowest settings, lol. Perhaps that could be a factor, but I don’t see how. As stated earlier, I usually get 55-60fps consistently while playing and chop has never been an issue for me outside of this circumstance.

It feels like the frame rate has been somehow tied into your ping–I just kind of assumed this was the case for everyone, but as I play with more and more folks I can’t recall anyone else actually saying they experience a similar issues when dealing with higher than normal ping. So, I figured why not just ask it outright here on the forums!

Do you experience this issue, or similar problems regarding high ping/network lag dramatically altering your framerates?

I am really curious if this is a thing with HOTS because I have not encountered such a direct correlation between these two variables anywhere else throughout all my years of gaming, so any responses would be appreciated, thanks for your time!

Hey TheGardener,

In Heroes of the Storm the FPS is indeed tied to your connection quality. This is due to the game being coded in a “lockstep” manner so that the server and client are synced. If your game client isn’t able to receive updates from the server as quickly and smoothly as you normally would then you will likely notice lower FPS or brief screen “freezes” as the client tries to keep up.

There were a couple of Reddit posts several years back that went into more detail about this, if you’re interested in reading about it.

Reddit post 1
Reddit post 2

Unfortunately the best answer to the problem here may just be to try avoid playing when the roommates are streaming/downloading.

1 Like

Awesome!
I’m just glad not to be alone on the issue, thanks for the quick response and links!