Okay, so I've been playing CSGO a lot because I really wanted to get good enough to stream and make some money on the side from something that I love doing. I'm a level 10 on faceit (but with sh*tty stats), just hovering around 1900-2300 elo for most of my 4800 games on faceit, but unable to get consistent results in improving the delays that I'm experiencing.
Anyway, I've been having this atrocious delay (not input lag), where the enemies would just come out and kill me way too quickly for me to react. For example, I would watch d0cc's videos and it always amazed me how slow his enemies would react even though he's playing pretty high elo lobbies. For me personally, I have to instantly react/flick, or else it would be impossible to outgun the enemy which is why I had to adopt an aggressive playstyle where I'm only able to catch enemies off-guard. The problem with that is, when you get to a high enough level, you need to be able to win other gunfights but in those situations it's just impossible for me to come out on top often enough.
I've gone through changing everything I could, all of the tweaks that people post and share (shoutout to people from "My mouse/input lag is killing me" on the Nvidia forum until the thread got locked/Nvidia forums interface turned to sh*t), and I've only discovered 2 things that actually made a difference for me:
1) Actually try letting windows install the Nvidia GPU driver.
After lurking on the forums, the first thing you would see people mention is "Uninstall via DDU and install the driver yourself". I did that, and while having the driver installed the proper way, I could never get any decent performance for 2-3 years. Then, one time, I just said, "Screw it," and tried letting windows install the Nvidia driver. There was a considerable improvement, however you must not touch the audio driver that gets installed alongside. For some reason, when you uninstall the audio driver, it gets worse for me as if I installed the GPU driver by myself. I know that it doesn't make sense, but we're all dealing with problems that don't make sense in the first place, there are some many factors here that sometimes a less logical solution actually works.
2) Try using a different connection (try sharing LTE from your phone via a USB cable/a TCP VPN connection)
In one of d0cc's videos, I saw him mention that he was actually playing on an LTE connection shared from his phone (he had to temporarily do that for whatever circ*mstance). I tried it: and even though my ping went from 75 on an ethernet connection to 110 when sharing internet from the phone via USB, it became much easier to hold corners. Before, I always had to play in such a playstyle where I would peek and prefire a certain angle, that was the only way for me to get some kills, but I was able to actually hold corners for the first time in years. Before, I would never be able to hold an angle with a deagle unless I just randomly flick and pray that I hit the guy, now I was able to get 2-3 kills in 1 round his holding the same angle.
This was a nice improvement for some time, but playing with 110 ping still kinda sucks ass so I kept trying to find little edges and improvements here and there but they were just vain.
Then I kinda half-quit CS:GO for a while until half a year ago where I tried to take a more methodical approach. I assumed that there was some bullsh*t with how my provider handles UDP so I used my surfshark VPN (using it via OpenVPN) and started playing via a TCP connection. Much better. And now my performance was actually better when I installed the GPU driver after a DDU wipe rather than letting windows update install it for me.
My other observations:
1. There is some kind of bullsh*t/update that makes windows perform worse after an OS install. After discovering that a TCP VPN connection was better for me, I was testing back and forth between Windows Server 2022 and Windows Pro N build 1909, when after installing Windows Pro N build 1909 I decided to play a game on native 1440p (I usually play 4:3) and actually played fullscreen windowed because that's what it defaults to after I do a windows install. The input was horrendous but I actually wasn't getting prefired like I used to. I got a whopping 130 ADR during the game and it felt like most of my gunfights were against bots who had a slow reaction time (even though this is still level 10 faceit in Europe). Then, I kept the game fullscreen windowed and just changed the desktop to 1280x960, had a couple more AMAZING games (39 kills, which is incredible for someone like me who is usuall 18-19 average). I decided NOT TO touch a single f*cking, leave it as is, but the next day everything returned to sh*t. No matter what I tried afterwards, it was garbage after that.
It's either some registry entries that get added and make the hardware perform suboptimally or something, I don't know. I tried creating a restore point after a fresh install and after I install all of the drivers, and I would go back to that restore point at the beginning of every day, but then the restore point would still disappear.
I have to use a newer Windows edition because Faceit anticheat doesn't install on older OS versions, so like right now Faceit anticheat doesn't work on windows 1709/1803 and older.
2. The native network driver gets installed differently to the motherboard-recommended one.
On windows pro N (N edition doesn't have game bar, I'm still not sure if this is actually better or not so do test it), the native network driver (realtek chip) would install in NON-msi mode (box unchecked) with a limit of 1 (I use the old msi util that's very basic). When I install the nic driver from the vendor's site (B550 aorus elite V2), the network chip has MSI mode enabled with a limit of 16 instead of 1. On windows server 2022, however, both drivers would get installed with MSI mode enabled. You can try switching to the driver version that windows automatically installs and see for yourself. It's not that it's better, but the first shot accuracy is more consistent but the spraying gets worse.
On a side note, even before I made any other network-related discoveries, I noticed on my intel systems that the gaming was a bit better when I loaded into windows on one driver version and then switched to another one, so there is something strange with the MSI mode and the limit on both intel and AMD systems.
3. 3.5mm sound and USB sound make a HUGE difference.
This one's obvious and has been talked by many, but try switching from USB sound to 3.5mm and vice versa. For 3.5mm sound, you can test 3 main options:
1. No audio driver (High Definition audio)
2. The realtek driver that Windows installs
3. A realtek driver from your vendor's site
You can try a bunch of different versions and stuff, but in my case they were all just not worth it.
Even your microphone input device has an affect on input lag/performance
I use a Blue Yeti for work (a decent USB mic), and I was often too lazy to disconnect it before I played. I actually put my headphone jack into my Blue Yeti because it supports output and I played like that for a long time, then I switched to the motherboard 3.5mm sound, now I disconnect my USB mic every time I play and I just use the crappy built-in mic on my webcam.
Setting up your PC for matchmaking and Faceit are completely different things!
I obviously care (cared) more about Faceit for CSGO, and it baffled me how I would set up my system for Faceit and play somewhat decently, but then I would play matchmaking with my IRL friends and I was an absolute bot on friggin LEM level where the enemies are bots. Likewise, if I set my system up for matchmaking, I suck balls on faceit.
This also reminds me of one of WarOwl's videos where he seemed really disappointed about his performance because he was getting rekt on LE-LEM to the point where I think he was almost in tears because of how frustrating it was to get killed by a random kid and not even having the possibility to react. He also even pondered quitting the game. But of course he can't blame it on input lag because 3000 hour DMG-level redditors are gonna call him a tinfoil hat crybaby and trash him.
Now, onto CS2
my VPN doesn't work properly in CS2, it would disconnect after a round or two so now I have to install the GPU driver via windows again. before I did that, I was bottom fragging like every game on a quite low elo. As soon as I uninstall the GPU driver through windows update, I was able to carry my weight (~1-1.2kd) but not much more which is still disappointing because I'm mostly playing against noobs in the calibration games. But the game actually became playable.
Cs2 settings: disabled Nvidia reflex!!!
I cannot f*cking believe that a trillion dollar company's (PUTS ON NVIDIA!!1) "improvement" actually makes this game way more laggier. It just makes me think that if these smartasses can't fix it with decent funding, not one will.
I think that the problem in cases like mine isn't with input lag, it's more with a server-to-output latency which isn't accurately reflected by the ping. Right now, everybody's obsessed with measuring input lag with a 1000 fps camera, but those reading don't reflect the full story.
CS2 shooting mechanic are atrocious, I'm having to change from 600 eDPI to 800 eDPI and the recoil is still f*cking uncontrollable. I think the rifle recoils would be controllable at 1200 eDPI for me but at that point I don't even want to play this game because it's not even a game, it's a wrist tunnel syndrome simulator. In CSGO, the game really favoured low sens players (new DUST2 vs old DUST2 has much wider spaces, so the game started to favour lower sens players, de_cache used to be really popular before and that was another one of those map where you have long-distance engagements most of the time and low sens was preferred. It was stupid how low you needed the sens to be to hit shots consistently, but whatever, at least you had to have strong enough shoulders/upper arms to handle that.
Now, with the new mechanics, higher sens players are way more favoured but a high sens your wrists just conk out after 2-3 hours of playing, f*ck that.
I still don't know if N editions are better than the Gamebar editions so let me know what you think about this.
I've been experimenting with MTU size at the moment but it doesn't really seem to make a difference.
Had to get this off my chest somewhere, this seems to be the only place.
Good luck, my fellow tinkerers, give yourself a year or two to fix it, if it's not enough, just quit gaming and put your heart into something more rewarding in the long run. Do I regret kinda wasting 6 years of my life? Yes, because I really hoped I would find a fix and make it pro/semi-pro in the end. But at the same time, the game was kind of fun and I think that Faceit gives you such thick skin that this will be useful in real life.
It's either ISP related but really nearly impossible to detect (I have a good 100mb connection with low bufferbloat), or it's electricity related (I think those EMI guys are cuckoo but I realize that who knows, maybe they're right, maybe I'm the cuckooo one).
Either way, the problems are too hard to detect in our time and age because such competitive gaming is relatively new and there isn't enough infrastructure available to monitor it. Maybe when we're like 60 years old this sh*t will be fixed.
Cheers!
