Prior to patch 1.21, Overwatch maintained two estimates for your network quality: RTT and ping. Your RTT (round trip time) was measured as the time between sending a packet to the server and hearing a response, which included some application processing time on both ends. Calculating your ping, on the other hand, required us to timestamp every packet at the exact moment it was sent or received, something that became much more expensive after we patched for Meltdown & Spectre. Without these timestamps, your ping and your RTT are effectively the same value.
Rather than report a less accurate and less stable ping, we opted to merge the ping and RTT stats into the single Latency figure you now see in Advanced Performance Stats. You can expect this Latency number to be 10-20ms more than the ping value we previously displayed (higher if your system isnāt hitting 60FPS consistently). The difference between your old Ping and the new Latency figure is purely due to the missing timestamps, and has no effect on your gameplay. Latency measurement will also be more responsive to changes in network quality ā your ping previously was averaged over 15 seconds, which made it hard to notice brief latency spikes. The new value is sampled over the last 3 seconds, and should do a better job of capturing brief hiccups in connectivity.
As a part of this patch, we also disabled displaying the Latency statistic if youāre not in a match. The numbers displayed while out of a match were the last stale values from your previous match and did not reflect your current networking environment.
(We missed including this in our patch notes, sorry for any confusion!)
I have posted the following screenshot to demonstrate the change:
Note if you did not have the original RTT setting turned on, you will need to turn on the new Latency Stat on order for it to appear. You can make the new Latency Stat appear by going to:
Options > Video > Display Performance Stats > Advance Performance Stats > Show Network Latency = ON
IND: Interpolation Delay
To make sure other playersā movements and actions appear smooth on your screen, there is a small buffer of time between when your client gets information from the server, and when itās shown to you in the game. This is normally around 50-60ms for normal games. If your IND value is much higher, follow the steps on our connection troubleshooting article to try and resolve the problem.
Open your NetGraph by pressing Ctrl+Shift+N, and check the SIM rate. If during any time you are seeing your sim rate increase when particle effects or certain animations are playing, you may be having system performance issues. Check my handy guide here to learn more on how to improve this:
Ohhh thank you for this!
I was freaking out, cause i just upgraded my Internet speed today, then saw the patch, jumped into OW and thought my ISP messed something up.
Now i am relieved. Nice communication
Thanks for the attempt to explain it. But its universal regardless of visual fidelity. Physics tick rate is always defaulted to a fraction of actual game tick, so Junkrat gets no priory in any update. He might as well have double the RTT when it comes to his projectiles.
There are several problems with this. Iāll try to be brief, as Iāve already explained in more detail elsewhere.
āLATENCYā is a more cluttered tag to read than the previous āPNGā. If you really want to get away from āpingā (which I honestly can not understand, as ping has been the standard for gauging connection for decades) then please at least use a similar abbreviationāRTT or the common LTN would be fineārather than having the whole word āLATENCYā. Itās just extra characters cluttering the corner for no benefit.
Please return the tag to displaying when outside of a match. I know you said it took the reading off the last game, but Iāve observed spikes while waiting in the menus before; it may not be the moment-to-moment update, but it clearly was checking in here and there, and itās useful. More importantly, itās nice to have such UI elements be uniform at all times, rather than having technical UI elements pop in and out.
The full network information graphs (ctrl + shift + N) are reporting different figures than the top corner latency display. In the full graphs, my connection still reads <18ms across the board, including the ālatencyā reading there; the latency display in the corner, at the same time, reports >40ms. This >40ms may be in line with your new measurements, but itās bizarre and unhelpful that the full network info display and this new display do not match up. If youāre going to have latency display the full connection time then surely it should do so both in the corner and on the full graph; having two ālatencyā readings which give different figures isnāt very helpful. (Though in general I would say this new latency measurement isnāt as helpful as a simple ping check, anyway, for the purposes of frame counting. As someone with a background in pro gaming, ping is a far more valuable measurement to me than full circle latency. This is why every other game you can name still reports a simple one-way ping check.)
In other words, this change is less functional and the two methods of monitoring your connection are now inconsistent.
Please reinstate the previous ping display, if not instead of the new one, then in addition to the new latency display; for example, the option could cycle to display latency, display ping, or display nothing (āoffā). If youāre absolutely set on not allowing players to have a quick ping check, at least get the new latency display and the full network graph latency display to line up.
Could you explain this āmergeā you mentioned? Where do you pull this number from? Why is it lower than the RTT ever was yet 11-15 higher than my typical ping? And why is it actually noticeable? Did you not actually just downgrade your servers?
When youāre in the menus, you are not connected to any particular game server. Even if the numbers would change at the menu screen, and that change would be due to the client measuring itās connectivity to some random server, itās still not an accurate representation of your current connection speed. Chances are these number changes are just the client averaging the remainder of the the previously mentioned 15 second interval the old client used to use. Either way, it really had no value at all.
but good to know, I was wondering where my ping went