PSA: Fix for unplayable stuttering with USB Tethering Internet connection

[allquixotic]

I was experiencing an issue where the game would experience 3-5 seconds of freezing followed by about 0.5 seconds of running normally, repeatedly, in a loop, starting at the part where the main menu is doing 3d rendering of the opening scene. The intro videos render fine. Obviously, playing the game at a rate of 0.5 seconds of gameplay every 5 seconds is unplayable.

I eventually narrowed this down to only occur when my USB Verizon Hotspot (Jetpack) was plugged in. So I thought that I could either play XCOM 2 with no Internet, or plug in my Internet and not play XCOM 2. Since this is my primary Internet connection, I had no alternative.

Except that the problem was actually due to a driver misconfiguration! USB hotspots (including Android smartphones tethered over USB) expose themselves to the OS through a protocol called Remote NDIS. NDIS has gone through various version releases from Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and Windows 10. The biggest NDIS change was from version 5.x to version 6.x.

Somehow, when I plugged in my Jetpack, Windows 10 (64-bit) installed the NDIS version 5.x drivers for my Jetpack, even though the version 6.x drivers are also available to the system. This actually causes a whole host of severe problems with applications such as the built-in Control Panel applet "Network Connections", which takes a very long time to load, but some people never use that app so they'd have no idea that it's a problem. I have never seen this pose a problem to games, though.

The NDIS version 6 drivers have been around since Windows Vista, so it's a real head-scratcher as to why the OS initializes it with NDIS version 5.x instead of 6. However, when following this manual procedure to force it to load the NDIS 6.x driver, my problem with XCOM 2 went away completely. Everything runs great now!

The detailed steps to fix this problem are located here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/general/fix-usb-tethering-lags-freezes-windows-t3039183

In short, what you need to do is Update Driver on your Remote NDIS device, then manually pick a driver on your computer, then select the vendor as Microsoft and the driver as "USB RNDIS6". This will update your driver and bump your Internet connection. After that, XCOM 2 will run smoothly.

If the procedure I just described doesn't work, head over to the XDA forums I linked to above and there are some other alternative ways to obtain and install an NDIS 6 version of the Remote NDIS driver.

It appears I'm not the only one having this problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/448t5p/xcom_2_is_having_the_same_stutter_fps_technical/

I put in a ticket with 2K Games to see if they can add this problem diagnosis and fix to their body of support knowledge in the hopes that we as a community can "get the message out" about this issue, no matter which venue people seek for technical support, be it Steam, official 2K support, or Reddit.

Hope this was helpful!

[只給舒服 ❤ 不給幸福]

Thanks it really works