Lag/ping spikes in steam games

[76561198963430722]

Hi.

I used to have a very old laptop that could only run Brawlhalla. It was ok, but many times id get lag spikes (the 3 bars that show connection quality would go from green to yellow or red). Sometimes the loggin screen would show the game connecting to Steam servers but not Brawlhalla servers.
So i thought it was a game specific issues.

Past month i got a new HP notebook.
Ryzen 5 3500u
Vega 8
8GB
Wireless connection

Played cs go and got ove 100 fps with everything on low, and never saw major dips. But sometimes i kept getting lag spikes 8fps wasnt dropping but i kept getting frozen in place, warping around, etc). Redownloaded brawlhalla and the same issues as before persisted.

I went into the console and did a ping test and sometimes it would spike to over 100, 200 or even 1000. But it isnt constant. Ive connected to spain servers, eu west and east servers and got good ping many times. It seems to happen at random.

A message i noticed was "steamnetworkingsockets assertion failed" (not the fulll thing, sorry) in the console.

I reinstalled league of legends to test non steam games and i haven't had ping spikes (or fps issues) in that game.

I've tried a few thing. I updated the network card drivers directly in the device manager and even removed the save power option from them.

I also did a ping test in the command prompt (to googles dns server 8.8.8.8) while playing Brawlhalla and both spiked at the same time. So changing DNS is out

I even unistalled Avast (and an old kaspersky) free because it seems to cause issues (and i didnt want it anymore too)

So im stuck. Maybe its some leftover file from the AVs or maybe its Windows Defender? Im not sure if its steam or on my end (lol and everything else seems fine)

Could really use some help. Thx

[Cathulhu]

Have you tried with an ethernet cable instead of Wifi?
Wifi is very well known to be a bad choice for gaming to be being prone to interference also by it's inherent problems which CSMA/CA can only solve partially.

[76561198963430722]

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

Have you tried with an ethernet cable instead of Wifi?
Wifi is very well known to be a bad choice for gaming to be being prone to interference also by it's inherent problems which CSMA/CA can only solve partially.

I actually had to buy a custom cable because i was having issues with my network card in my old laptop. Problem is that it got broke and my wifi card went back to normal. So i never fixed it. Not id have to take out, get a new one, run it around the outside (live in an apartment), etc.

Id be a ton a work, as much id prefer wired. SO im trying to find another solution first.

Plus, like i said, i dont get this issue in LOL. I kept a close eye on the ping reader and i never went bellow the usual 50-60. Even fortnite on the iphone doesnt get issues. It seems to be steam related.

[76561198963430722]

So i used net_graph on cs and had no packet loss during a heavy ping spike.

So at this point, i dont know what could be causing it. Any help?

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by rugapt:

So i used net_graph on cs and had no packet loss during a heavy ping spike.

So at this point, i dont know what could be causing it. Any help?

I wouldn't rest all your assessment on packets and ping, as they don't tell the story by half. You can have a perfectly fine ping and packet loss, but have a lousy connection that causes lag galore.

The simple reason is packets sent to assess ping are tiny. Game data is sent in far bigger packets.