I just finished Solasta yesterday. It was a great game and I enjoyed it very much. I was particularly fond of my Sorcerer/Rogue duo and will be looking forward to build something similar in bg3.
Now that I have about 3 hours in front of me for playing, I'll be restarting from scratch and enjoy the whole experience.
Some network latency issues
Well, not a very good experience so far. I have a regularly unstable connection. At regular intervals, I have a high latency peak, that make the game stutter (as I'm playing through Shadow). It will make it unplayable.
It is happening exactly every 30s. I move from 16ms of latency to 76ms, which created a distinct stutter in sound and image in the game.
Time to debug. I'll test without Shadow open, and I'll test with another wifi connection.
I tried restarting the Shadow stream, but it didn't work, still spikes every 30s.
I closed Shadow, and now my latency is globally worse. Average ping is higher than with Shadow opened. This is surprising. I'll re-open Shadow to check.
First line is with Shadow opened. Every yellow bit is regularly every 30s. Second line is once I connected to my Shadow machine. Regular low pulse.
The regularity of it can clearly be seen here. Every 30s, it's too regular to be random. I'll keep shadow opened, along with BG3 running, so I can know by the sound of it when the spike happens.
I managed to have it fixed, albeit I'm unsure how. I moved to another location in my house (hopefully with better wifi coverage). Disconnected from wifi, and also put all our phones in Airplane mode, then reconnected to Wifi and to shadow. Then connected all the phones back. Turned out to fix the issue. I don't really explain why, but it seems that I need to have no other device connected when I first connect to the wifi for this laptop to get the best of its connection.
I tried to connect and this time Shadow is telling me I need to change my password? But I never had one to begin with.
Turn out I can leave everything blank and keep going.
I tried to play tonight, but I again ad the latency spikes every 30s. Even doing the previous dance of disconnecting all the mobile phones in the house and starting again didn't fix it. I didn't want to spent 1h to debug it to play 20mn, so I dropped out.
I turned Power Mode to Balanced. Now my laptop does less noise. It also seem to have had an impact on the average ping when idle outside of Shadow, but I still have the spikes in Shadow.
I compared to another laptop that has the same OS, and it has a much better ping and much better speedtest results than this computer. On my gaming laptop, I have a lot of Jitter and spike on ping, I can even see lost packets on upload.
This doesn't seem to be specific to Shadow. Even an idle connection outside of Shadow is unstable. I am going to compare configuration between the two machines. Maybe it's something to do with power management. I'll also test with another connection.
On my other laptop, I also seem to have a spike at regular interval, but more every minute or so. Maybe it's because Shadow is opened on this one?
Didn't work, I still have spikes on Work Laptop every minute, even when idle. On Gaming Laptop, I have constant noise when idle (so hard to see any spike). When I launch Shadow, everything is flat, except for a spike every 30s.
I checked if slowness on the gaming laptop resulted in spikes on the work laptop, but no. It has no impact. So it's not Shadow that creates slowness on the network, it's slowness on my network that makes Shadow stutter.
This time it's even worse, it's every 8s or so now.
The latency issue is clearly visible on Shadow UI.
But there doesn't seem to be any packet drop.
I removed a line I had a in a script that was checking my latency every 30s. I removed it on the Gaming Laptop, gonna remove it on the work laptop as well. Doesn't seem to have an impact, Shadow still has a regular Latency curve. Spikes on Work Laptop are also here.
I'll turn down Gaming Laptop, to see if the spikes on Work Laptop disappear.
Spikes disappear on WL (Work Laptop) when I turned off GL (Gaming Laptop), so it's something GL is doing. I rebooted GL. No spikes on login screen. I opened kitty, it's hard to see if there is an impact on WL. It's pretty flat with some spikes, but I'm not sure it's regular or not. I'll cut Wifi on GL to see.
Turning Wifi made the regular spikes (1mn or so), disappear. So it's not a physical inteference, it's something to do with the wifi. Gonna re-activate it on GL.
I saw a spike a few seconds after having activated it, and then about every 60s. So the wifi connection on GL does have an impact on the latency of WL.
I connected GL on my phone 5G hotspot to test.
Connection on hotspot is very unstable, but that is to be expected with a hotspot. But I can see no more spikes on WL.
It means that the issue does not lie with the wifi card of GL that would create interferences, the issue might lie with the router and the way several devices want to connect to the same router.
I will attempt to reboot the router, and reconnect devices one by one.
Wait, I saw a spike on WL. I don't know where it's coming from. I'll disconnect GL from the hotspot and wait. No it must have been a glitch, I waited more and it didn't start again. Ah wait yes it does, every 2mn or so. Gonna wait a bit more to confirm if it happens again.
Actually, I again have a spike every minute, even with GL off. Maybe it's because my wife just connected her? I'm going to have to test that. Nope, not connected.
I did some Speedtest on both, and strangely enough, the speed test is better on GL (195 up, 142 down, and 22 ping) than on WL (115 up, 56 down, same 22 ping). The prettyping graph on GL is still a mess while the one on WL is still mostly flat.
Gonna try the weird solution of turning off Bluetooth. I don't think it will have much impact, but let's try. I also see that I have a MEDIATEK Corp. MT7921 802.11ax wifi card, and I'm seeing some issues online about its slow download speed.
Typing iwconfig, I also see I only have a Bit Rate of 117Mb/s, while it's 585Mb/s on the WL. I still see regular spikes on both laptops, gonna test in Shadow. What I find very surprising is that I had managed to do several long play sessions without any issue, and now I can't get rid of it.
What now I can open Shadow, but running Steam or BG3 doesn't do anything? What the fuck is going on here now? Ok, a Shadow reboot fixed it.
And even with Bluetooth off, I still have stuttering in bg3. Back to the drawing board. One solution might be to buy a new wifi card, this one seem to have a lot of bad reviews.
What I will also try is to play with the IPV4/IPV6 configuration of the connection, to see if somehow it fixes the issue.
I disabled IPv4, I didn't see any change on the prettyping, and the speedtest seems the same. Gonna test in Shadow. Actually, I turned off Wifi and turned it on again. I can connect to Shadow, but can't browse. Disabling IPv4 might have been too harsh.
Let's disable IPv6 instead. With IPv6 turned down I can browse, I'm trying to connect to shadow. The ping graph is still not impressive. The Shadow speedtest seem to have improved though. Maybe just a flupke, I'll give it another try.
Yep, it was a flupke, it's still messy. Still unplayable in Shadow.
Other things to try are to change the type of wifi: 802.11n, 802.11ac, 802.11ax. Not sure what it does, nor how to do it, but some people say it helped. If it doesn't work, I should try upgrading the driver.
I installed iw.
$ iw dev
phy#0
Interface wlp45s0
ifindex 3
wdev 0x1
addr 14:13:33:e2:6d:6f
ssid Waterfront
type managed
channel 52 (5260 MHz), width: 80 MHz, center1: 5290 MHz
txpower 3.00 dBm
multicast TXQ:
qsz-byt qsz-pkt flows drops marks overlmt hashcol tx-bytes tx-packets
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
$ iw dev wlp45s0 link
Connected to 8c:97:ea:e5:2f:cc (on wlp45s0)
SSID: Waterfront
freq: 5260
RX: 678755168 bytes (526977 packets)
TX: 446653289 bytes (485403 packets)
signal: -73 dBm
rx bitrate: 292.6 MBit/s VHT-MCS 6 80MHz short GI VHT-NSS 1
tx bitrate: 175.5 MBit/s VHT-MCS 4 80MHz VHT-NSS 1
bss flags: short-slot-time
dtim period: 2
beacon int: 120
I can see on the WL a tx bitrate of 520Mb instead of 175 here.
The VHT-MCS seem to mean that I'm using 802.11ac (thanks Google), and I also have it on the WL (VHT-MCS 5 80Mhz short GI VHT-NSS 2).
For context, the Wifi 802.ax standard is also called Wifi 6. Its predecessor was 802.11ac, aka Wifi 5. My card has "802.11ax" in its name, but I don't know if I'm using it, nor how to know.
Also, 2.4Ghz band is for 802.11n. 802.11ac works in 5Ghz, while 802.11ax uses both 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz. Interesting, but I'm unsure how it applies to me. All I see is that I have regular, like clockwork spikes.
And wait, my Bluetooth is on again? I was sure I turned that off previously. Maybe running Shadow turned it on automatically? Restarting Shadow didn't enable Bluetooth again, but it didn't fix the issue either.
Time for some food, and I'll try to update the drivers later.
Things to try:
Turn power management off- Reboot the router
Assign specific channels for wifi- Update drivers
Disconnect the printer- Physically change the Wifi card
I'm going to go out for lunch, I disconnected wifi on GL, I'll see if it decrease issue on WL. I'm back. No, still same issue on WL, still a spike every minute or so. I'll try to also disconnect my phone.
Even with the GL wifi turned off, my phone and my wife phone turned off, I'm still seeing spikes on the WL. They are too regular to be expected. I will try to disconnect/reconnect the WL from wifi. If it doesn't work, I'll track all other devices connected and remove them one by one.
But first, I removed Bluetooth from the WL. I don't expect any change, but let's try. Seeing the spikes on the WL as well make me clearly see it's an issue with the router/wifi, not with a specific device. The wifi card on the GL being less powerful it show much on that laptop apparently.
It's actually even worse, now I have the 30s spikes on the WL...
I turned of the wifi from the Samsung tablet, I don't even need it there. In my router configuration, I can see two devices connected. One is the printer (I will disconnect it later to check), and the other has a MAC address of F6:6F, but I don't know which device this is.
$ ip addr show wlp45s0 | grep link/ether
link/ether 14:13:33:e2:6d:6f brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
This device MAC address is 14:13. Definitely not this one (it's not even connected). Gonna test the others. WL is B4:D5. Who is F6:6F?
I'm going to disconnect the printer until I know who is this weird device. The printer mac is CC:6B, still not this one. The printer is now off.
I can see from the router configuration the WL connected on the 5Ghz/802.11ac, and the F6:6F on the 2.4Ghz/802.11n. The printer got correctly disconnected.
I still have the spikes.
I gathered all laptops from the house, I'm going to plug them in one by one and name them in the router interface. Turned out the F6:6F was my professional phone, but I already had it listed in the router under another name. Maybe I mislabelled it. I turned it off anyway.
I'm going to move the WL around in the house, see if I can get those spikes down by being somewhere else. Oh wait wait wait. Ping now seems to be pretty flat on WL. Gonna wait a bit more.
I also found this in the Ubuntu options. Since I turned that off on WL, spikes have stopped. But I also disconnected every other device at the same time, so I don't know if it's related.
I'm going to re-enable it on WL to see if issues come back. Nope, I re-enabled it and everything seems to still work. Maybe the issue was coming from my professional phone? Gonna switch it on again to check. Still a pretty flat ping on WL.
So I fixed the issue on WL, but I don't know how. I did turn off Connectivity Checking at the same time as WL was the only connected device and spikes disappeared. Switching it back on and turning on the phone back didn't broke it.
I'll now turn wifi back on GL and see. It's hard to say. Curve is still random on GL, and still mostly flat on WL. I will try in Shadow. Still stutters every 30s, even with COnnectivity Checking turned off, but at least the curve on WL is flat. Issue is now only on GL.
I'm going to try to turn power management off. sudo iwconfig wlp45s0 power off It's correctly turned off, but still stuttering in Shadow.
I turned the pro phone off as well. Still stuttering.
I turned bluetooth of my tablet. Still stuttering. I can't turn the bluetooth off of every device I have (or my neighbors have, for that matter), anyway.
I now have to do some calls, I'll let the gaming laptop somewhere else in the house while I do, and keep the ping running, I'll see after my call.
Coming back from the call I can see that GL put itself to sleep and buggued; I cannot put it back from sleep, so I have to shut it down and restart. It means I can't see the ping history.
I started the ping again, and this time it seems to work better? There is still some latency, but it seems stable.
Maybe it's the reboot, or maybe it's because I'm upstairs. Let's try Shadow. Oh and by the way, Power Management put itself back on after the reboot.
Weirdly, the pulse is not flat while in Shadow as it usually is between spikes. There are no high spikes here, but the game still stutter.
Latency doesn't have regular spikes, but it does have latency. This might be due to the fact that I'm on battery, and not pluggued. I'll be going downstairs again and plug it.
Weird, even pluggued it does weird things. I'll leave it connected for 30mn to check later.
I let it run, there are no visible spikes, but it's still not very good and it stutters a lot. Also, considering how flat it was before under Shadow, I'm not sure this is an improvement.
The latency in Shadow is even worse.
And the spikes have started coming again on the WL...
I updated my router settings to specify channels for both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wifi. This had required some wait for the router to reconfigure itself. And it seems that when I reconfigured the 2.4Ghz one, my GL fan stopped. Maybe somehow it has an issue when connecting to 2.4Ghz? Because the fan seem to have started again the moment the 2.4Ghz came back.
I'm going to test that again, and specifically disable the 2.4Ghz and see the impact on the fan and maybe the latency.
Ah shit, I thought I would de-activate the 2.4Ghz thing, but I actually de-activated the whole wifi from the router. And how do I turn it on now that I don't have wifi anymore?
Apparently I can go on my ISP website and activate it back from there. But I need to download their app, and the app tells me to connect to the wifi first... But I de-activated it! I can't do it from there... I might need to find an Ethernet cable to connect directly to the router, but I don't think I have any.
I had to go outside under a scorching heat, do three shops before finally being able to find such a cable. I pluggued it and at least now I have absolutely no latency at all on GL. Still, it will be unpractical to play with a cable running through the whole house (and I'm not even sure it will be long enough).
I could connect to my router interface, and could also enable remote access to it even if not on the same network (through password) for later.
Latency in Shadow through Ethernet is a dream. But I wanted to solve the Wifi issue initially, not revert to Ethernet. It pains me, but I'll have to disconnect the Ethernet.
I'm upstairs, less than 2m from the router, and this is what I have as a graph. Not very good. I'm now going to see if I can update the drivers of the wifi card somehow.
$ sudo apt-get install inxi
$ inxi -Nnz
Network:
Device-1: MEDIATEK MT7921 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter
driver: mt7921e
IF: wlp45s0 state: up mac: <filter>
Device-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
driver: r8169
IF: enp46s0 state: down mac: <filter>
So I'm using Mediatek MT7912, with driver mt7921e.
First, I did some apt update and apt upgrade. I'll now reboot to test again. If it doesn't work, I'll try sudo apt install linux-firmware.
I rebooted (well, I forced reboot as the laptop also refuses to shut down), and when I started it on again, it suggested "advanced options" for Ubuntu, allowing me to load an older version of the kernel (5 instead of 6), so this is what I try.
Connection seems more stable now, and also the fan seems to be doing less noise. I wonder if it's due to the kernel downgrade, or due to the apt updates.
I'll do a Shadow test to see.
Ping is stable.
Shadow Latency seems ok.
I cannot open a game though, I'll have to reboot shadow, to see if a game stutters.
Still some spikes. Not as regularly and as unplayable as before, but still not fun to play. I don't consider it fixed.
I closed all laptops for the day, and opened GL again. It booter on kernel 6 this time.
Shadow latency seems ok, but I might need to wait a bit longer to see spikes.
Ping latency is average. There still seem to be some regular spikes.
Well, it seems to be working.
I managed to play a long session. No idea what made it work or not.
Tonight there were some latency, making the game a bit slow here and there, some average 60ms ping. So I disconnected and reconnected to my wifi (I re-enabled IPV6 as well).
And now I have high spike every 30s again. It's even worse than before the reconnect.