Issue regarding extremely high latency and lag

[c0mplicated]

I am running on a higher end setup, with a 40 series card, and ever since the day the workshop update released, CS2 has been mostly unplayable. I've been facing issues such as not being able to switch weapons, plant, use util, sliding when strafing and walking, unable to unshift walk and unable to shift walk, unable to uncrouch and crouch, 3/5 of my shots not registering as a hit despite full firing animation and cross hair within hitbox, sudden lag spikes, routing through servers that are thousands of miles away and even when i get my local server, it has 200 ping because it decides to route my connection through New York when I'm west coast and so is the game server, enemy players and teammates often teleport or deal damage up to five seconds after firing (the killed behind a wall bug thats been around for a while now), and to top it off, extremely inconsistent network utilization and extremely high jitter despite low ping connection.

Some may say this is just complaining, but I will gladly prove this, as I have already recorded footage of all of the problems I listed occuring in slow motion to pinpoint the moments when it happens. My main issue with this, other than it being unplayable of course, is that the issues are never consistent and are always unpredictable. I'll connect to my nearby gameserver, get 10-15 ping, have fluid and smooth input with no rubberbanding or lag, then suddenly a few rounds later lag will strike, causing all or some of the issues I listed. Sometimes when it strikes it comes back again or just stays that way for the rest of the match.

To clear out the possibility that it is my hardware or my own internet connection, I have tried doing the same movements and inputs on other games that are very taxing on internet connection and hardware requirements such as Rust, Apex Legends, Warzone, and even CS:GO on some of the few community servers left just as a comparison. None of the games listed had any issues with high ping. The only game I got high ping on was Rust on a 350 player server where I averaged 65-70 ping. None of the issues mentioned at the beginning happened at all when playing these games, the ping in the times that it was slightly higher (50-80 ping range) was nearly unnoticeable and had nearly zero effect on the quality of the gameplay and input.

Along with trying other games, I also changed various network settings to find a solution. I created an outbound connection rule in my firewall for CS2, which didnt work for me but seems to work for others. I prioritized CS2 for network usage, to no avail. I tried using different DNS, to no avail. I tried using a VPN in an attempt to force it to route only in relevance to where I am to no avail as it kept routing through random places very far from me. I totally optimized my settings on two computers, a pc and a laptop, both in game and in control panel, which alleviated the issues somewhat but still didn't fix very much. I cleared DirectX shader cache before launching game which worked temporarily then stopped working.

I have even changed routers to rule out the network issue, getting my jitter down to 1.5 and my download speed at 600mb/s, no success.

One factor that all games I tried shared is the lack of a "sub-tick" type system that Valve has implemented in CS2. Subtick, to my understanding, processes inputs based on the clientside input, and queues client side inputs inbetween ticks to ensure the most accuracy from player input to game input. Before with a fixed tickrate, inputs were processed serverside, meaning the inputs were processed from the perspective of the server. Meaning that if your crosshair was on an enemy but the server didnt process the input until the next tick and your crosshair was no longer on the enemy, the server would only show what input it observed during the tick, making high ping more detrimental to accuracy as your inputs could be delayed. Subtick however basically queues these inputs inbetween ticks, meaning even if the serverside didnt update when you made an input, the input gets queued until the server is able to recognize it and then accounts for the inputs and their effects fair and square (this is likely why people die behind walls after running away, the server just updated a tick or two and accounted for the queued inputs inbetween the two ticks.) This is likely why CS:GO did not have this issue at all for me, and truthfully did not feel as responsive or "fast" as CS2, but ran more consistently and only had issues with hit detection when ping was extremely bad.

My guess is that this is not necessarily an internet issue for the user (although very good internet could alleviate some of the symptoms of the delay), but flaws within Valve's game servers that were never addressed and created a vulnerability in the design of the sub-tick system. This is just an opinion, but the reason CS:GO doesn't do this on low ping but CS2 does is because the amount of inputs being created and subsequently queued in between server ticks can be potentially made futile if the server has high latency by itself. Because sub-tick is mainly designed to time stamp and recognize inputs exactly as they come and where they were made then make adjustments for the next tick to be 100% accurate, the server can possibly fail to do this if a player is far from the game server creating higher latency on the server side when communicating with the players inputs, or high user latency. I would imagine as a failsafe to prevent lag or low lag from being highly beneficial, the server could simply ignore inputs that occur too late after the server refreshes for another tick. If this weren't the case, a player with 500ms latency for example could spray down three players, the connection between the player and the server could be so highly delayed that all three players die several seconds later despite never seeing a player shooting at them or even peeking them. If the inputs truly queued and were only executed with pin point accuracy on the next tick, a player in theory could peek, shoot, then get away while a player with low latency to the server could not have received this information yet because the server hasnt received the players inputs yet despite planning to account for them when they are recognized and die to the high latency player. In theory, to prevent this, valve likely ignores inputs that do not sync with the inputs that other players have made within the same time it takes for a tick to update, inorder to make sure all players inputs are being recognized as they come, at the exact same time, and one players inputs wont be recognized quicker than another players. This could potentially mean some players inputs could be totally ignored and thus cancelled (such as weapon switching or nade throwing), while some players could have all of their inputs recognized within the tick simply because their latency between the server is low and quick enough to be recognized in time for the next tick.

TL:DR: CS2 is having serious input delay issues related to subtick and server latency and can often occur at no fault of the player but of the server. Many other games such as cs:go with fixed tickrate do not have this issue under the same conditions. This could be because some high latency players inputs between ticks are ignored while some aren't for fairness sake.

Sorry for the yapathon, but the only way for these things to get fixed is by complaining and whining about it, so by all means, complain, yap, and whine away if it helps valve improve the game. Hopefully this rant and testimony was helpful in some way and atleast lets you know you're not the only one dealing with the lag problem and it will likely get fixed soon because of that.

[Demonick Gaming #Skinape]

I'm having the same problem

[Max]

first niko niko ni wall text in 2024 award

[Kyuro]

Same Issues at EU side Servers, CS2 is unplayable. Getting Teleported back, weapons changing back. Ping a valve address 4 times to see how bad the situation is right now.
One time i got spawned with a P2000 under the ground. I forgot even how to play with the P2000. The next round i got the USP-S back, from nowhere. I never changed anything, this is all cs2 server issue.
Weirdest thing ever happened to me, feels like a beta actually.

[Lumine :3]

having the same issue. itll play fine but then ill get the "server latency 120+ms" warning and it just freezes for a sec. every single time i start spraying or looking at an enemy. pains me to see the game lile this and then half the community is smoking massive amounts of copium saying "skill issue" or "mad cuz bad" or licking valves boots saying its miles ahead of csgo. never ever had any issues with latency in csgo. literally got shot through a wall 3 seconds after peaking and moving back. jiggle peaking is impossible because it constantly rubber bands. my bullets go through the enemy or just dont render bc the server lag is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bad. oh but the game is sooooo good yeahhhh right. NOTHING will get fixed unless people start not playing the damn game or making posts like these and i think we all know these fall on deaf ears unfortunately. Love the game, was so hyped for cs2. ran great until the armory update. now i cant even sit still without the server spiking to kingdom come. for me it seems to be an issue with the game server "thinking" it knows what the best server is for latency. it connects to me dallas even though im on the west coast, saying it has 9ms latency which is just so so false. either that or atlanta, very rarely do i get a game in an LA or san diego sever and theyre buttery smooth. and no im not paying for a vpn just to fix a billion dollar companies game thats been out for about 2 years now

[V Gaming]

this game blows ass and we need to quit playing it lol

[akiuara]

Maybe buy a new wifi router to fix it?

[InnocentOtivaing]

have a similar issue for 1 server but routing services should be able to fix that like exitlag

you might be able to do something in your router settings to fix it too but im not really into networking so

[Justified Genocide]

I downloaded CS2 a year ago and suffered the same problems of inexplicable latency and ping constantly, until today when I redownloaded the game and found that the ping and latency is exactly the same. No other games are lagging, no other servers or services, its just CS2...