I’ve played using WiFi for years with no issues but for the last month or two I have encountered rubberbanding issues during games that make the game unplayable. In addition, when this is happening I do not get to see killcams, or the POTG.
What is weird is the Windows Resource Monitor reports zero (0) packets lost for any process or thread. This means that the hardware and driver and operating system consider all packets to be delivered. This contrasts with the in-client network overlay (shift-control-n) which shows around 80-90% packet in loss with a huge spike in CMDQ. My theory is the network client of the game has a bug where it abandons packets because it takes to long to process them and reports them internally as ‘dropped’, in this case one client thread is sending and another is receiving so the packet didn’t come from the internet as the threads look like they are using the TCP stack to do inter(intra?)-process communication.
Seeing as the wired connection would send even more packets which would make it easier to ‘overwhelm’ the network client, I believe this is not the cause, but rather the network client take more time to process a wi-fi packet and times-out and marks the packet as ‘dropped’ even though all the other components in the TCP stack considers the packet as delivered.
Hope this info gets to the Devs so they can fix the client.
And for anyone who is thinking “fix your wifi”, I want to point out that I’ve been using the same machine (5GHz 16-core 13th Gen Intel i7-13700K with 32GB of DDR5 memory and a gaming motherboard and Wifi setup for almost 2 years playing this game and only in the last two months has there been this problem.
[EDIT]
I tested my theory on a laptop with an i7, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and an RTX3050 on Windows 11, playing over wifi and also wired with the network monitors (both in client and the OS resource monitor) and the results are enlightening.
Using the wired connection, the latency, RTT, IND, CMDQ, packet loss were all negligible, when I used the same machine but switched to wifi all the net stats skyrocketed; for example the in-client net stats showed inbound packet loss of ~90% while the OS network monitor showed zero(0) packet loss, which means the packet loss is occurring in the client AFTER the packet has arrived on the the computer. In addition, the Latency and the RTT soared to over 1000, but the only difference was the local net link (wifi vs wired) so the rest of the connection to the server was the same, more evidence that the problem is in the local network module of the game client.
This wasn’t a problem with earlier version of the game, so Blizzard has a serious bug in their code. I believe the client has a bug in the network library in how it deals with packets from the wifi driver.