Windows 7 Online lag (primarily in games)

Posted this in the windows 7 forums but the only responses I got were others with similar issues.

Been running the RC for a little over a week. Everything ran smooth and great at first. Then for some reason last night my online lag went up in all games it seems.
In web pages and online use outside of games I get great speeds out of my FiOS but once I go in games my connection is worse than dial up. I was holding steady at 60 - 70ms ping, now I go from 90 - 250 and back every few seconds.

I have run speed tests and other things over and over all getting solid speeds, web pages and downloading program patches and such all going at full tilt on my connection. I am running with 64 bit Nvidia drivers for window's 7 and have reinstalled them to no avail.

I have not installed anything other than my G15 keyboard drivers in vista compatibility mode and changed some partitions around when this started to occur. My CPU and other usage is normal at 1 - 5% idle / web browsing. Network use is normal as well.

I have tested this across 3 games so far (all I have installed) all with the same online lag spikes. Further tests have been to run the same game(s) on one of my XP computers and had no lag at all with a rock solid ping.

I do not see any network services eating bandwidth so I am not sure where to look for a solution or other troubleshooting ideas. I am at a loss since I do not notice any slowdown with patch downloads, web browsing or speed tests even more so as it was working perfectly.

Any help would be welcome as I do not want to go back to XP.

I had this problem when I installed 7057. My latency in all games doubled and I was getting disconnected from servers and my network periodically. It turned out to be a bad Wireless NIC driver. I installed a new one from Windows Update and haven't had any problems since.

run a tracert to the servers you play on. There may be a bad hop somewhere.

Archer75 said:

run a tracert to the servers you play on. There may be a bad hop somewhere.

Click to expand...

If that were the case, it should have affected his XP system as well. How about physical layer - bad Cat5 cable perhaps? See if the problem follows the cable when swapping it between the two rigs? Reinstall/update NIC drivers on your Win7 rig?

Its not the connection to the servers, I tested the TF2 server through another XP system from 2002 and it was a solid 64 ping while my system was spiking like crazy.

I have reinstalled the windows7 Nvidia driver before but will go for it again.

I had not thought to look at the cable, especially since it works fine for speed tests and online browsing but will swap it out and see what happens.


Yesterday I deleted the drivers for my g15 and my ping went to 70 - 90 which was annoying but playable. Then tonight (no reboots or computer usage) ping is spiking again. Very baffeling. I'll check on the NIC and cable and see what happens.

Ripskin, have you ever had Vista on the system? If so, does it do the same thing? Microsoft changed a few settings with the way Vista/7 handle TCP/IP connections. They limited the amount of TCP connections and added some compression technologies.

Try this ... *note these are Vista fixes but should work in 7*

Customize windows components and uninstall remote differential compression

Open network connections and view properties for the tcp/ip settings and uncheck everything except ipv4. (if for some reason the network dies, try combination until you get ip/v4 and whatever else is needed but you should be ok with just ipv4, i was at least) These are features you don't need if you don't plan on using the network auto discovery or are on a ipv6 network, which your not.

Also, try disabling the TCP/IP auto tuning. It's supposed to help when there is a lot of network traffic but your by yourself. http://www.speedguide.net/faq_in_q.php?qid=247

Also, you may need to raise the TCP/IP limit (half-open patcher) http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/1...-vista-and-xp/ (I think 255 is max value)

Disable Network media throttling
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\
Name : NetworkThrottlingIndex
Value type : DWORD
Value data : From integer 1 through integer 70 (Decimal) (Decimal)

This system has been XP only in the past. I do have Vista on my HTPC but have only played one local game only on it so I never messed with the new network settings much.

I had seen someone else post that speedtest link on the windows thread but they had no mention of what it was fore.

Good information and a lot of good things to try. I will take a look tonight / tomorrow if I have time. Working till midnight all week.
I could see media throttling having an effect, but its just so weird due to lag resolving some of itself after I removed my keyboard drivers. Media throttling could have an affect on that with the G15's lcd stuff, we shall see.

I know its not the cable as I swapped that out today and such.

I shall report back once I get a chance to work on it, thanks for the info to try!

Tried it all except that TCP limit remover. Dont really want to install another bit of software. I downloaded a few trailers and such off vuze at 2.3m/bs so its not causing connection slow downs. I will test the connection to see if I am getting the symptoms of the limiter causing issues before trying that one for now...

The others resulted in no change. I Just dont get what is causing it since it worked just fine for a week.

The registry change would not stay as decimal, I got some numbers 1 to 70 to stick but none of them took decimal, they all went back to hex.

I really like windows 7 but this is getting really agrevating.

What exactly is the NIC that is having problems?

Have you tried resetting your router?

AreEss said:

What exactly is the NIC that is having problems?

Click to expand...

NIC is a 10/100/1000 onboard (number2) on the NF590 in my sig. I have tried NIC1 and the same issue occures.

ocellaris said:

Have you tried resetting your router?

Click to expand...

Router is the one built into my FiOS modem, usually when I reboot to "fix" it temporarily I reboot that as well. Last night that trick stopped working at all.

I can get it somewhat stable in Valve games by disabling multi core rendering, but I still get the weird spikes. Other games its the same issue.

Okay, tonight I ran through some more things, I found that if in TF2 I disable multi core rendering my FPS goes down the toilet but my CPU usage stops being a 100 all the time and my ping becomes the 70 - 90 that is manageable (still annoying.) Soon as I enable multi core rendering my FPS becomes more normal and my ping goes out the window.

I should not have to disable this as my system can handle it and decent graphics, no AA or anything fancy is enabled...

I took off my NIC drivers, (windows 7 Nvidia) and retried, no chance. Took off the Display drivers (windows 7 Nvidia) no change. Put them both back on and retried, no change.

2x post sorry

3x post lol....

It was completely opposite for me, I had XP my ping supposed to be 20 in Vista but in XP it spikes as soon as I refresh servers in FEAR or COD4. Anyways...installed Windows 7 ultimate 64bit and aye presto....not a single lag problem infact my ping has improved by 2 which is about 18-21 these days.

But yeah...make sure you update the drivers, mainly your network adapter drivers or if you have updated before you can roll back to the stock drivers and see what outcome you get from their and see if their has been any improvements. Another thing you can do is do a tracert either with some online available 3rd party programs or by cmd. Good Luck

Initially my ping was improved over XP. I have the only Nvidia windows 7 drivers available, redownloaded and reinstalled several times. Friday night I took off all drivers and went back to defaults, (keyboard, mouse, display & chipset(nic)) with no change at all.

After putting them all back on I went in to play tonight to do some more testing and my CPU is pegged at 100% usage which is very odd. Even before TF2 got multi core use the one core was never at 100%, multi core rendering should not have such a negative impact on my graphics...

I was running 180 - 200 fps in spawn, get into a battle, I hit 15 with it disabled, with it enabled about 29 was my low. As soon as my FPS drops, my CPU spikes, and my lag goes up. I am leaning now towards it being caused my something in my GPU not handling graphics causing my CPU to take the load increasing my latency... When I am not doing anything it hit a 68ms low in the spawn room. In a battle 20 or so FPS with 180ms ping...

So I dont think its with networking anymore, for some reason the GPU is not working properly with the OS and the CPU?

The drivers and system see and work properly with the GPU so I am not sure. I will have to do more testing.

Any other suggestions please keep em coming :|

Well I did a full format and went through my drivers one by one with restore points. At the moment it looks like my GPU driver from Nvidia was causing issues. Its the only Windows 7 64bit one they have.

Going to test for a while to make sure that was causing it.

I thought I was the only one with problems with the only freaking driver available win7 64
When there is slot of action on halo1 my fps drop signifinitely on so this didn't happen at all ever it's not my pc the games like 6 years old definite driver issue but not just with online games I'm haveing problems where the gps start. At like 10fps then slowly work there way up to maximum gps whatever it is for any game let's say same game in so is 45fps then when a lvl loads it may start at1 or 2 Fps lower than max and work it's way up but with win 7 when a game loads of starts really low and works it's way up or if there's aloe of intense action and the fps drop then it goes to say 15 fps then itstarts up and d slowly makes it's way back up but if the game has slot of explosions aremovement in general it stays at a low fps even if it's an old game like halo1. On iPod so forgive and forget