I'm asking about packet loss that happens while I play games, so what do you say?
I'm asking about packet loss that happens while I play games, so what do you say?
I don't think I'm the best at networking or wifi, but lately while playing games, my connection keeps dropping packets way too much and that's pretty bad. My ping number doesn't change and neither does my FPS (frames per second), yet something feels wrong because of those lost packets. I have a realtek gaming 2.5gbe controller card in my computer, and I've already tried resetting the network settings, switched to Windows 11 from an older version just because I didn't really care about updates, and checked my router's firmware up to date even though there isn't anything new for it yet. Next on my list is trying to swap out the ethernet cable myself so I don't have to call a tech to help me, but since I'm pretty limited in how much technical stuff I know, any ideas you could give me would be great?
It's pretty simple to tell if your internet is actually losing packets or something else is wrong. Open a few Command Prompt windows while you play the game. Leave one of them running a ping command that goes to 8.8.8.8 and another that pings your router's IP address. When things start going wrong in the game, switch between those two commands quickly. If you see errors with either one, check both to figure out which is failing. Losses for your local router IP usually mean something inside your house is blocking the connection. It's very rare when using ethernet cable. But if there are problems hitting 8.8.8.8, it likely means the whole line coming into your home is down; you'd need to do more testing to be sure.
I don't know how things used to be. It just happened that recently something changed.
On the 8.8.8.8 site, things go up and sometimes it hangs or times out
So if the router connected to your modem is working well, but saying 8.8.8.8 gives bad results, that usually means something is wrong outside your house. Your next move is to run tracert (traceroute) against 8.8.8.8. This test won't find any problems on its own. The goal here is to figure out which router IPs are in the way of your connection. Hop one should be your router's IP address, and hop two should be the first ISP router's IP. This checks how data travels from your house to that initial ISP gear. That's usually where you see data loss happen. Now, try pinging both "hop 1" and "hop 2" in the background using your command window. You want no problems with hop one but a problem with hop two. Once you do this, try asking your ISP about why they can't find the issue. Tell them that since you have loss on hop one, it's not your PC or router. If both hops work fine, keep testing other routers along the path, but getting fixed gets harder as you go further away from your house. It could be a problem in another ISP network instead of yours.