I’ve noticed this bug for as long as I can remember. But let me provide a little background first.
I used to have a relatively slow mechanical hard drive. Often times, when games started it would take 30 seconds or so to load in character models on the character select screen. I upgraded to a newer SSD and this issue disappeared completely.
However, nowadays I do notice a brief lag-spike mid game whenever someone swaps characters. It is very slight, but still noticeable. It can potentially throw me off in an intense firefight. I’ll always feel a brief ‘blip’ followed immediately by a teammate’s character swap phrase, e.g. ‘Junkrat primed and ready!’ and the words Player switched to Junkrat (was Sombra), etc. By getting the feel for this lag I can usually tell when someone on the enemy team switches as well, even though there is no audio or visual cue to confirm it.
If you are interested in testing this for yourself, just play mystery heroes. People are always swapping and you will feel it for sure.
I imagine this is due to the game or system having to ‘load in’ the new character model. I also experience a similar lag spike when I play deathmatch. The entire game will get a huge lag spike when someone gets the first kill as if the game needs to ‘load in’ the scoreboard.
I am running a Ryzen 7 1700, GTX 1080, and 16 GB of DDR4 @ 3000mhz. Overwatch is installed on a SSD. For a long time I was concerned my AMD processor was to blame, but if someone wants to confirm this issue happens with Intel CPU’s as well I would feel a lot better.
I don’t know if a fix for something like this would even be possible, due to it being the architecture of the game. But if I could get confirmation that others encounter this issue with HDD’s or Intel CPU’s I would feel better knowing at least the playing field is equal and eliminate the possibility that something is wrong with my hardware.
Best regards,