Laggy shots and delayed actions with perfect latency and IND

Technical Support
1

Hi there,

My latency is a constant 45ms, and my IND is 20 but a lot of my shots are delayed by a pretty big margin. If someone is standing still in front of me and I fire at their head, there’s a small but noticeable delay before I get the hit sound or hit marker, and this is even more prominent in normal play. My FPS is also comfortably above 200. I’ve also played for a bit with the netgraph on just to test and it was fine, no packet loss or anything.

Widowmaker is the worst offender. I can see the trail appearing later than when I fired, and when I press right click, there’s a delay before the game actually scopes me in.

BUT… there are a few things that I’ve managed to narrow down.

  1. This happens ONLY in competitive mode OR when a custom game is set to competitive settings and filled with 12 players (I scrim every day so it’s easy to notice). Pre-game warmup deathmatch on Chateau is mostly fine, or any of the fun custom games you can find in the browser.

  2. Turning OFF the shader cache in Nvidia Control Panel appears to fix these delays, especially with the Widow scope but it seems to cause some microstutter and the game doesn’t feel so smooth anymore.

My rig is an i7 6700k, AsRock Z270 motherboard, Nvidia GTX 970, 16 GB 3200mhz RAM and Overwatch is installed on an SSD. If I move my folder to my HDD, the delays are even worse.

3 Likes
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Let me know if you manage to narrow it down, I’ve been having identical issues. I keep thinking its somehow my setup…but it only ever seems to affect overwatch as far as I can tell. I was going to buy a ryzen 2700x and the new taichi board to see if its possible my processor/mobo/memory combo is responsible. I still might do it to be absolutely sure.

I’ll check out my shader cache and see how that affects my lag too as well as the kill feed you mentioned in another post.

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I thought it was my set up too, but I changed my motherboard from a Gigabyte Z170 to a brand new AsRock Z270, and it’s still there. A friend with an old AMD FX processor also has this same issue, but the only thing we have in common is a GTX 970.

For both of us, borderless windowed also feels more responsive than Fullscreen, which sounds absurd and is something I’ve never come across in my 15+ years of competitive gaming.

Another common symptom was that if I try to jig gle peek someone around a corner, they kill me first, and in the kill cam, I can see myself moving way out of the corner and in full view, giving the enemy an easy shot. But while I’m playing, it appears like I’m barely peeking out in my own pov and can only just about see the enemy.

Since I didn’t get any help here, I scoured the CS:GO subreddit and found a few things since then that seem to have helped immensely, but knowing my luck it won’t last. Anyway, I’m just gonna list them down in case it helps you or anyone else. Fair warning though, some of these might sound ridiculous and impossible.

  1. Turning off the Kill Feed seems to make overall gameplay much smoother for me, but it’s not a viable solution for competitive play.

  2. Turning off the cache seems to help quite a bit with the delayed actions, but my frames don’t see that smooth anymore. Still, I’ll take it over the alternative.

  3. Setting Windows Power Options to BALANCED instead of High Performance but Overwatch to Prefer Maximum performance in Nvidia Control Panel. This sounds really dumb, I know. Made no sense to me either, but this particular configuration seems to work best on my PC.

  4. Deleting all instances of Nvidia and Realtek audio drivers (especially Nvidia Virtual Audio or whatever which Windows 10 automatically installed.) I use the standard MS drivers and I’ve also set the sound quality in audio properties to DVD quality instead of Studio.

  5. Setting my render scale to Automatic, which then sets it to 100% instead of manually setting it to 100% or even 75%. You’d think it shouldn’t make any difference, but if you open up the settings file, the Automatic value sets this - UseGPUScale = “1” while any other setting changes that to 0 and makes my game feel weird. I suspect this is something to do with my particular monitor though, it may or may not do anything for someone else.

  6. Now the biggest thing that helped me is following the steps carefully from some guy’s post on the CS GO subreddit about removing Intel Chipset and ME drivers. The post has since been deleted and I can’t directly link to the pastebin mirror, but if you google “200 Intel fix pastebin”, it should be the first search result. After I followed those steps, Overwatch feels like a dream to play on. My friend tried it and reported the same thing too. However, it’s only been a day since I did it so I might need to play more games.

Disclaimer - The last step involves removing drivers / listings from System Devices. It should be perfectly safe because when you first clean install Windows, it still runs properly without any of those, but just in case, back up your stuff.

1 Like
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Appreciate all the info. Its funny I’ve been scouring the internet gathering information about how to fix the input lag and there’s a A LOT of consistencies in what you’re saying. I’m going to address each of your numbered points and respond to each with my findings:

  1. Turning off the kill feed for myself immediately caused my SIM to drop. Disabling it had an immediate effect sometimes my sim was jumping up to 30+ if enough activity had gone on in the kill feed.

  2. The cache I can’t comment on too much just yet as I’m still testing but with it enabled I had minimal input lag and my game was still perfectly smooth.

  3. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this so you’re not crazy. On the Nvidia forums which I’ve been scouring for months this has been proven to sadly (somehow) increase performance and stability. Someone had proven it does have a positive effect through extensive testing.

  4. I haven’t tried this yet but I also haven’t installed my audio drivers intentionally. I’ve disabled all traces of windows update as well so it doesn’t automatically download something to replace it.

  5. Haven’t tried this yet but I will.

  6. I had been aware of this fix a while back. I found it very difficult to keep the drivers from reinstalling. So on my fresh install of windows I have intentionally avoided installing chipset drivers. I’ll double check to see if it installed something in its place.

Something else of interest for you. When you had mentioned the kill feed and it yielded very positive results for me I noticed something else. I was still getting more minor jumping in SIM. So i ran some tests to find the problem and funny enough if you or other players in a game spam things like ‘I need healing’ or your ult charge the SIM spikes from that as well. Its the same idea as the kill feed. The more items that appear in the chat rapidly the higher your SIM becomes.

*I played with my FPS locked at a stable 150fps so dipping fps wouldn’t be a factor. Both my computers have identical symptoms: 6700k with AMD R9 390 & 7700k with 1080ti.

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Have you been able to reliably stop the chipset drivers or anything else from reinstalling? Both my friend and I noticed vastly improved response after removing them like I mentioned, but today it seems to be creeping back towards the laggy feeling for both of us. I can’t tell if Windows has installed anything else.

I think I’ll just format again and refrain from installing the drivers in the first place instead of manually deleting anything.

Do you know a good way to keep these drivers (or anything else) from installing on its own but still get security updates?

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Not really, it usually at random decides to re-enable itself even if I disable them with or without the drivers. I’ve noticed many triggers that more or less temporarily fix the input lag. For me all these will fix the input lag for a day or a single boot:

  • Reinstall GPU drivers
  • Reinstall Chipset Drivers
  • Reinstall NVME Drivers
  • Modify Settings in the BIOS and reboot

Those have all seemed to have mitigated the issue, only to have it come back within another boot or a few days even. I’m really not where the issue is coming from but it affects both my PCs. Pretty frustrating nonetheless since it feels like I can only play at a diamond/master level with all the delays.

I really don’t know what could be causing it in totally different builds. Out of curiosity what brand of RAM are you running? And what kind of SSD do you have?

I’m trying to figure out if we have any consistencies between our builds. The only thing that’s the same between my own personal builds are intel processors, Asus motherboards (which you obviously don’t have so i can rule that out), GSKILL ram, and Samsung drives (one M.2 and a regular 860 evo).

Edit: Worth noting I never have any performance issues FPS-wise for either PC.

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I have G.Skill 3200mhz RAM and a Samsung 750 evo SSD too. With my previous motherboard my mice used to be very sluggish, but once I replaced it, that issue has mostly gone away. My actions are still delayed though.

FPS is always above 200 and ping is stable at 45.

Yeah, I’ve noticed these things too. Nothing I do seems to permanently fix anything. I thought it could be a Windows 10 issue, but it happened to me on 8.1 and 7 too.

Also, do all your USB ports feel the same when it comes to mouse input?

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Yeah I’ve tried all my ports, and disabling/enabling USB3. No real difference there.

Actually I’m playing right now and it feels pretty bad. It’s only delayed actions for me as well. There’s no floaty feeling to the mouse at all from what I can tell.

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Out of curiosity what CAS latency is your RAM rated for? Mine was a 3866 18CAS GSkill Trident Z RGB. I’m testing another set of ram I have on hand that’s a 3200 16CAS GSkill Ripjaws V

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16 CAS Ripjaws V. 16 18 18 38 to be precise.

Another weird update though. I have this single USB port on the front panel of my PC, and if I plug my mouse into this one, the delay is all but gone, or at least very minimal. On any other port, it’s very noticeable when there’s a lot of action going on in games.

The funny thing however, is that in this particular port alone, if I disconnect or connect my mouse, I don’t get that sound you hear from Windows when you plug a device in, and there’s no delay in being able to use the mouse either. On every other port in my PC, I can hear the sound and it takes a few seconds to turn the lights on in the mouse.

edit: Ok, I actually give up now. This morning I got my SIM down to a stable 6.5, spiking only to 8 even in full games.

Then I went to bed and rebooted later. Spiking to 25 just standing idle in the training range. I’m lost.

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Hmmm…what version of Windows are you running? If i run any of the newer windows 10 builds I get SIM spikes, with nothing else running in the background and a handful of services I disabled. Ranging from 3.3-20sim (killfeed off). I was testing the newest build this morning (1803) when those spikes happened in the training ground. Every time I’ve had an older build like 1511 or 1607 (without updates) the SIM is stable as long as I disable services like Windows Defender & BITS.

So for my PC I discovered something last night actually that might apply to you (I’m not sure). I’ve always had issues even getting RAM that was approved for the QVL to run. For example i have 32gb of Ripjaws V 3200mhz (16CAS & same timings as yours) that couldn’t reach 3200 no matter how much tweaking I did in the bios. Then I read something about if you don’t have CSM disabled completely in the bios before you install windows (and keep it disabled after that) you don’t get a true UEFI install of windows. Naturally I doubted it would do anything…then immediately when i disabled that setting my PC easily could utilize my RAM and seems a lot more stable. Also the splash screen before my BIOS is now 1440p which it has never been. Its always been a blurry mess before that setting. Not sure if that applies to you as much as it did for me since I’m running an M.2 drive but worth looking into I think. I have no earthly idea why it affected my system’s ability to POST in such a positive way but I’m not going to question it.

I’m going to install an old build of windows 10 (1511) this evening and I’ll let you know if the SIM is stable for me. Then I’ll test it over the next few days. If the issue comes back I’m going to buy the Asrock x470 Taichi Ultimate with a Ryzen 2700x and see how that goes. I’m trying to see if my build is salvageable before that Asrock board is released.

Edit: Also my PC boots about 10x as fast now with CSM off. I’m hoping this affects my input lag in a positive way. I won’t be able to tell until I have time to play some rounds over the next couple days to determine if it helped; though it already improved other aspects of my system.

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wow. I don’t believe this.

This actually made a significant difference for me, not just in Overwatch but everything else too. Previously, my windows folders used to be sluggish and Chrome stuttered, but this appears to have fixed it completely. I can feel the smoothness just scrolling through a webpage.

It feels like my programs are finally making use of my GPU properly, from Overwatch to Chrome to Discord, and even just Windows UI.

So after I read your comment, I googled how to disable CSM since I couldn’t find it easily on my board, and I came across this reddit thread on the AMD sub on how to properly install Windows for minimum latency (which includes disabling CSM). Now the poster of that thread received a lot of backlash, but I still went ahead and followed his steps to the tee.

The funny thing is he says to install the Chipset drivers (although for AMD) but even though I was skeptical at first, I decided to try it in the order he wrote. Guess what? Even with the Chipset drivers and Intel ME driver, the delay is gone. In fact it might even be better with them installed now. Windows Update also auto installed the full Nvidia package with the extras like 3D Controller and Geforce Experience that I typically used to skip for performance issues, but it’s fine even with all of that. The best part is this smooth feeling seems to stick even after reboot!! There’s still a little bit of SIM spike, but I believe it’s because of my Windows build, and it still somehow feels fine to play on.

I honestly can’t believe it, so I’m gonna test this setup for 2-3 days before drawing conclusions, but if it works, you’ve just saved me a ton of cash my dude. Regardless, thank you so much for your help. I’ll keep you posted.

edit - One thing to note however. That guy tells you to disable Legacy USB support in the UEFI, but when I did that, it failed to recognize my keyboard and mouse so I couldn’t even enter it. Had to reset my CMOS using the jumpers and start again, but with Legacy USB enabled this time. Just keep this in mind in case you decide to try it.

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I’m glad its making a noticeable difference for you! Apparently installing windows without CSM is important, mostly for M.2 drives but I think it applies to all SSDs. Hopefully the input lag doesn’t come back for you, I’m still testing my setup. Usually in my experiences the first day of a reinstall I don’t get input lag then it comes back seemingly at random. I should inform you too that recently Nvidia admitted their drivers (397.31 I think, though i don’t know the exact version number) has been ‘deleting itself’ or ‘unable to utilize itself’ after a reboot. This may be related to our issues as well. Since we usually only get symptoms of the issue after a reboot. Their newest driver should hopefully fix it as they had patched it with a hot fix 397.55. Newest one is 397.64 but apparently I can’t link it in these forums…in any case you can find it on the nvidia site.

I’ve never heard of ‘self-deleting’ drivers but apparently Nvidia managed to do that. If the input lag comes back for you this might be the next logical step.

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Well it’s not fully solved but better. I still have a weird issue where every USB port seems to feel different with regards to sensitivity, AND hit registration.

But I’m getting closer I think.

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Have you ever tried a PCI-E USB 3 hub? Was something I had thought to give a shot a while back but didn’t bother.

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No, I haven’t. Do you have this same issue too? Some ports seem to pick up on micro adjustments more than others, and on some, I can see my crosshair in game while tracking, but it doesn’t register the hits. Like the info isn’t being sent fast enough to the game or whatever.

Sounds like a network thing, but changing USB ports gives different results.

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I have been posting about network issues for a while, i can only say that the dev thinks that it’s working as intended…

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I can’t say I’ve extensively tested the USB ports.

And I’m fairly certain it has nothing to do with networking issues. I have two separate ISPs at my house because I thought my original ISP was the problem and it so turns out when I use either I have the exact same symptoms. My former teammates all live in the same city as me on the same ISPs and they don’t seem to have any problems whatsoever, so I’m ruling that out for myself.

I’m going to be testing the new Nvidia driver, I installed it last night and of course upon first install of a GPU driver my game felt fluid. Its usually on restart my symptoms come back so we’ll see how that goes. I’m pretty interested in the fact that apparently Windows likes to get rid of drivers on reboot. I’m leaning more towards that being related to these problems, mainly because the symptoms are similar to what others have reported and the fact that my PC acts up on reboot is a little too coincidental. But I’m just guessing at this point, I’ll see what happens in the next little while. I might still order a Ryzen 2700x (because they’re great from what I’ve heard) with an Asrock board to see what happens. Not sure if I should order new memory too but I’ll figure that out as I go.

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This problem is a tricky one there are so many variables.
But Ill give a few suggestions which i didn’t see you mention as i skimmed through, but i assume you have tried anyway but if not they are good things to try.

Firstly update your bios to the latest. The fact you have USB issues suggest to me that Mobo would be the first suspect.
download “Latencymon” & have it run whilst you play overwatch (it can help identify roughly where the issue is.
Go into your bios and disable all “C states” & Intel speed-step.
Disable HPET in bios & windows. Run CMD as admin bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock Restart pc.
Disable “Dynamic tick” Run cmd as admin “bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes” restart pc.

I dunno what to suggest other than that tbh this kind of problem is a tricky one because it can be caused by almost anything but is usually CPU/Mobo. One thing i can say is make sure u have literally every process/task turned off to minimise the issue So that you idle at 0-1% CPU.

Also just quickly does the issue persist offline? Because you can rule out the network card/driver immediately by testing that.

Again disable your soundcard in bios temporarily and boot overwatch and test to rule it out.

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I honestly wish there was an ‘offline’ training ground option. At least I would’ve been able to isolate my issue with that. Closest game I can think of to test input lag would be the far cry series. But overwatch is the game I find easiest to discern if the problem is happening. I’ll do some offline testing as well if I can find the time.

The lag doesn’t really coincide with my ping though that’s the thing. I won’t get any ping jumping or packet loss and my shots will be delayed just enough to make me miss.