Huh, correct. I didn’t realize that was your ISP’s address. Oddly enough, your modem isn’t counting as a ‘hop’ here, so it makes it difficult to see if the connection quality at the modem is good or poor. That said, if that’s to your ISP, it’s not a bad connection. Most likely this isn’t the core problem after all.
Did you ever get a chance to run the HWMonitor test I requested earlier? I need to see what your hardware’s up to if we are looking away from connectivity either way.
I posted it above: https://i.imgur.com/7WwRn41.png
My game is pretty much unplayable. There’s so much warping and stutter updates even though my FPS is flawless and my ping is low. As a support, I just see people in front of me go 100% to 0 without any client updates.
How do I diagnose what the problem is? WinMTR shows no packet loss yet the game acts like I’m missing packets?
It’s definitely odd to say the least. Nicole mentioned disabling Quality of Service options earlier. Did you end up doing that at any point? If you’re not dropping packets, and if your hardware stats look this good (more on that in a sec) then packet scheduling due to QoS is a possible culprit (if you also have NIC QoS - you’ve bypassed the router’s QoS.) Killer network cards have built in QoS, which is why I bring this up. If our packets are getting low priority it’s normal to see this kind of behavior. Another possible point of failure would be something about how your old modem is handling packets or what channels it has available. I’ve had an experience pretty similar to retteendmoon in the past myself, and a modem upgrade was the fix there as well.
As for your hardware stats, they look fine other than the fact that the GPU/CPU isn’t getting used much. I assume you’ve set your settings to low, or are you still using default or high settings?
Swapping ethernet cable didn’t improve anything. As expected, since I don’t experience networking problems in any other game.
My experience playing OW: the moment I see an orange icon, for a good 15 seconds or so, my ability to connect with targets is pathetic and players warp around like crazy.
Here is WinMTR using Firefox VPN to Los Angeles:
| Host | % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
| 10.64.0.1 | 0 | 363 | 363 | 11 | 13 | 18 | 12 |
| 89.45.90.1 | 0 | 363 | 363 | 12 | 13 | 22 | 13 |
| No response from host | 100 | 74 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| te-1-2-0.bb1.nyc1.us.m247.com | 0 | 363 | 363 | 12 | 13 | 23 | 13 |
| 206.72.211.247.any2ix.coresite.com | 0 | 363 | 363 | 12 | 17 | 81 | 26 |
| ae1-br02-csla1.as57976.net | 1 | 360 | 359 | 12 | 15 | 68 | 13 |
| xe-0-0-1-3-br02-eqla1.as57976.net | 0 | 363 | 363 | 12 | 52 | 709 | 13 |
| 137.221.68.93 | 0 | 363 | 363 | 12 | 16 | 117 | 13 |
| No response from host | 100 | 74 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Edit 2: I installed new ethernet, coax, and coax splitters today. I essentially replaced all cables in my network and I believe the problem is fixed. I’ll do more testing tonight to isolate the exact issue and confirm that it’s resolved.
My latest theory is that my previous coax splitter was ultra sketchy, probably ~15 years old. I’m going to nag Spectrum to see if they can replace the splitter outside my residence too.
It’s still premature, but thanks again for the your help: @Drakuloth, @Caterpepi, @Nicole.
Edited: Reverted per your request
Okay, time to get creative.
What if we use a VPN client? Any old free one should do for this test - unless you have a preferred one. It should give you a reasonably worse connection than what you have currently, but if it fixes the warping, that could be an indicator that your connection is paradoxically too good most of the time, then hiccuping into a situation where prediction gets weird, as you assume.
Swapping ethernet cable didn’t improve anything. As expected, since I don’t experience networking problems in any other game.
My experience playing OW: the moment I see an orange icon, for a good 15 seconds or so, my ability to connect with targets is pathetic and players warp around like crazy.
Here is WinMTR using Firefox VPN to Los Angeles:
| Host | % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
| 10.64.0.1 | 0 | 363 | 363 | 11 | 13 | 18 | 12 |
| 89.45.90.1 | 0 | 363 | 363 | 12 | 13 | 22 | 13 |
| No response from host | 100 | 74 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| te-1-2-0.bb1.nyc1.us.m247.com | 0 | 363 | 363 | 12 | 13 | 23 | 13 |
| 206.72.211.247.any2ix.coresite.com | 0 | 363 | 363 | 12 | 17 | 81 | 26 |
| ae1-br02-csla1.as57976.net | 1 | 360 | 359 | 12 | 15 | 68 | 13 |
| xe-0-0-1-3-br02-eqla1.as57976.net | 0 | 363 | 363 | 12 | 52 | 709 | 13 |
| 137.221.68.93 | 0 | 363 | 363 | 12 | 16 | 117 | 13 |
| No response from host | 100 | 74 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Edit: I installed new ethernet, coax, and coax splitters today. I essentially replaced all cables in my network and I believe the problem is fixed. I’ll do more testing tonight to isolate the exact issue and confirm that it’s resolved.
My latest theory is that my previous coax splitter was ultra sketchy, probably ~15 years old. I’m going to nag Spectrum to see if they can replace the splitter outside my residence too.
It’s still premature, but thanks again for the your help: @Drakuloth, @Caterpepi, @Nicole.
Edit 3: no, it’s still unplayable 
Edit 4: Something is beyond broken. The last game I played players were warping 20 meters+. It even felt like my movement speed was higher than normal.
Random chat messages show up as “Unspecified”.
https://i.imgur.com/u1idGbr.jpg
When I play training grounds (which looks server-side send-rate limited), my netgraph looks absolutely flawless. Min/Max RTT ~4 ms. 0 orange icons for 10+ minutes.
I’ve never seen a dropped packet in WinMTR.
Did you get around to testing a VPN, or alternative network like mobile broadband, to narrow down the issue as ISP-related?
The VPN WinMTR results are in my previous post: “Here is WinMTR using Firefox VPN to Los Angeles:”. I noticed no difference in performance. I also tried servers in Salt Lake and Texas.
There seems like there should better Overwatch network/debugging tools than WinMTR. A traceroute is incredibly basic, and WinMTR doesn’t even show results over time or useful statistics like median, standard deviation, various quantiles, etc.
All WinMTR shows is that I’m not experiencing packet loss over ICMP, but isn’t Overwatch netplay a mix of UDP and TCP?
Even the in-game netgraph is kinda silly since it can’t be minimized to a corner of the screen to analysis during gameplay. I’ve tried playing quickplay with the netgraph active and all I see is a nearly perfect connection that gets occasional spikes that are still sub-50ms.
I’m not exactly sure yellow “LAT X/Y/Z” means, probably Latency, Min/Avg/Max over some short window, but what I see is 0/5/10 and then every orange vertical spike corresponds to the max (Z) going to 15-30+. It boggles my mind how this can cause such chaotic prediction in-game, which is why, as a programmer myself, it feels like I’m bouncing between two different prediction schemes.
https://i.imgur.com/AlOfsLA.jpg
Note: my numbers spike right as a take a screenshot since I’m using the in-game mechanism rather than Nvidia Geforce Experience (since it doesn’t capture the Overwatch interface.)
Here is a image capture from my phone:
https://i.imgur.com/yjqjd6j.jpg
I missed it, I read a lot of threads 
The spike is mostly white, which corresponds to hardware delay/no response. It seems your hardware stops processing the incoming data, which then leads to the orange tick (latency/packet loss) right after it.
Did you experience the same issues when using your phone as the connection source? If yes, then it’s probably a hardware/conflicting software problem. If not, then we know for sure it’s an ISP problem.
Did you respond to that in the reply above? I see there are three edits, but I can’t see post history like the staff can.
I used to have lag spikes where the game would stutter (and have orange network graph ticks) when using the Spotify webplayer in Chrome, but not when using it in Firefox.
As an example for how one program can interfere with the network performance of another.
@maloo: I’m not having any rendering-relating stuttering: my FPS never dips and my CPU and GPU temps are fine (see above).
@Nicole: I did tests with bandwidth limiting enabled/disabled and QoS enabled/disabled, with no difference in performance. The results were posted above but got deleted by some forum bug.
The white spike in the screenshot above is my computer saving the screenshot to disk. I took a photograph with my phone just to show what my netgraph looks like normally.
I have no idea why the Overwatch screenshot mechanism is so foobar. Shouldn’t taking a screenshot capture the current frame? Why does the screenshot show the HUD AFTER the screenshot is collected? Seems buggy. And using Nvidia functionality, like upscaling/supersampling/etc, causes screenshots that have no Overwatch HUD (eg. no netgraph.)
Tonight, I’m installing a new router and I’m moving my cable modem closer to source. I’ll also try using my phone as a hotspot. I’ll keep this thread updated with my results.
Replying in case you have other things to add.
Hey there Raffy
I saw you put in a ticket and used the opportunity to peek at that information. Despite the fact that your CPU utilization/temps seem okay, you do appear to be having a large number of conflict-type errors on your machine. For some reason even VLC is crashing on your machine, and that’s a pretty lightweight client.
Unfortunately we can’t see exactly why this is happening but this is making me lean a bit more towards what maloo was mentioning. It could be some interaction between several different things on your machine which would explain why this has been so complicated to narrow down so far. I’d try closing absolutely everything but the game, right down to your media playing apps and browsers, and see if any of that helps. You’ve been having this error for months now with no sign of ISP shenanigans, so I think we’ve pretty well narrowed it down to a conflict of some sort or some kind of rare hardware issue. The trick would be identifying what that is.
If closing off everything else doesn’t help, we might need to see how your hardware is performing as a whole in a vacuum. To do that I’d have you grab the userbenchmark utlity, run it, then link us the report it generates at the end. Might get us a bit more insight since our information so far hasn’t been yielding what we expect for this kind of problem.
Sorry for the late response. Here is a recap of my investigations so far:
Current network setup after hardware replacements: coax from outside + [new coax T-splitter + new coax] + same Arris SB6183 Cable modem + [new cat6] + new EdgeMAX Router (QoS disabled) + [new cat6] + my PC. (I’m still waiting for the Arris SB8200 release.)
My cable modem SNR looks good: https://i.imgur.com/HphTkWG.png
My typical latency to lax1 is ~24ms. I understand OW isn’t about bandwidth, but here are 3 speed tests: https://i.imgur.com/6xeBwRs.png
To eliminate any further issues: I’ve reduced my settings to Low @ 1920x1080, which leaves GPU temps under 60 C. I’ve made extra effort to run OW w/o any other applications active: https://i.imgur.com/qlfpwB7.png
I still see an endless orange icons (both types) in-game.
My work machine (9990K 2x2080Ti) is a few miles away, but also on the same ISP, experiences the same latency/icon issues.
I have colocated hardware in a Los Angeles data center. I ran a long duration MTR to my home router and see no packet loss and incredibly low latency (~6ms) with a max still under 60ms. The official Blizzard Looking Glass doesn’t sample a long enough period.
I ran Wireshark during a few games of Overwatch to look for UDP issues. I only issue I see are periodic “malformed” RTCP packets, which I think? is just Wireshark being aggressive: https://raffy.antistupid.com/junk/OW_24-105-15-137.pcapng.gz (15MB)
If any engineer wants to test themselves, you can temporarily reach my router at ow-debug.antistupid.com.
UserBenchmark: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/33189194#
Continuation of this thread:
I have no idea how to debug my connection problem. I’ve re-installed Windows. I’ve reinstalled Overwatch. I’ve tried different drivers. I’ve replaced my modem. I’ve replaced my router. I replaced my coax. I’ve replaced ethernet cables.
My in-game latency is ~25 ms but everything warps around. I put all my graphics settings on low. I die to almost every AoE ult. With projectile heros, my accuracy is pathetic. I miss Ana grenades directly into crowds of people. It takes multiple key presses to get Zen orbs to apply – it’s actually so slow I can apply it twice per target. It’s like the things on my screen aren’t where they say they are. I mostly die because the enemy team warps into me before I can do anything. During team fights, I miss every shot and then I die or we win.
How do I diagnose the issue?
I read your update on the last thread, I’m sure Drakuloth just missed it since they are usually very good about following up.
Did you look into the conflicts they mentioned?
I realize it wouldn’t explain both PCs showing an issue unless they are very similar builds with similar software.
I wasn’t provided any extra information regarding the VLC crash? but I imagine it was just a force-quit. However, I’m currently on a fresh Windows 10 install with only Overwatch installed.
What I’m looking for is a way to determine what the problem is.
I don’t notice any performance issues, at low 75% render, my CPU and GPU barely do anything. My FPS is pegged at vsync. However, I can feel when the lag is happening when I’m playing, stuff warps around, I get stuck on objects, sounds become very confusing, etc.
It feels like I’m not getting updates from the server and/or my machine is not processing them.
Yeah it literally just seems to be a problem with Overwatch. I get problems with lag for no reason whatsoever. All the solutions they peddle are just garbage, I’m fairly certain the problem lies with them. No other game is like this, and people with excellent internet report problems with things like this too.
Conflict-type errors would be the main focus here – meaning hardware, drivers, or Windows itself conflicting with one another – not VLC. I think they pointed out VLC since it’s not an app known for crashing, and it’s surprising to see that error.
I saw you compared tests to a data center in LA where you have hardware hosted, but that isn’t going to be useful unless the hardware is inside Blizzard’s building. Your ISP will use a different route for each place. A few local hops will be the same, but that’s about it.
I think the main issue you’re going to run into is that connection troubleshooting is provided as a courtesy, and they may not have anything else they can suggest from their end of things. Their data centers are monitored 24/7, so when an issue arises they’re going to know about it, and they would have mentioned anything ongoing in your last thread.
To touch on the netgraphs from the last thread:
Network Icons
You may see amber-colored icons pulse on the upper-left portion of your screen while playing Overwatch.
This icon pulses when your client hasn’t heard from the server for a period longer than your interpolation delay. If this icon is consistently pulsing, it may indicate a connection problem, and can cause erratic behavior in game.
This icon will pulse when packet loss is detected. This could indicate a connection problem and can result in erratic game behavior if it goes on for an extended period of time.
Note: The thresholds for the above icons are currently turned down very low, and will pulse when there isn’t necessarily a problem. This threshold may change.
Source: Diagnosing Overwatch Network Problems - Blizzard Support
I have Spectrum coming to my house tomorrow to check my connection.
I’ve been recording clips of how out of sync my connection appears. This is the first clip I’ve edited. There is a jump in interpolation (20 -> 21) without any orange icons (although I think they followed this clip by a few seconds)
https://imgur.com/a/mwsjXgO
Again, I have 0% packet loss over hours of MTR to QP servers. Uncapped FPS easily hits 400 FPS while recording 1080p60.
I’ve been trying to play with the net monitor active and it appears that my “PPS IN” blurs to “64.X” (instead of “65.X” like PPS) when my connection is goofy. When my connection is good, my ping is 23ms and when it’s bad it averages to 30ms. Every few seconds, it seems to take 2-3x longer than average to get an update from the server.