Online gaming network tweaks

However, reportedly it has issues with some ATI Video card drivers and certain applications performance. Therefore we recommend turning it off set to zero for gaming. Windows 10 Creators' update introduced a "Game Bar" to to help Xbox integration and gaming in general, however, they can reportedly cause stuttering during gaming, especially with Windows 10 builds prior to v This section includes gaming-specific tweaks not listed in our general tweaking articles and not implemented by the TCP Optimizer.

In the same Registry hive as the above two tweaks, you can also change the priority of Games, compared to other types of traffic.

Indicates whether this is a background task. The maximum guaranteed clock rate the system uses if a thread joins disk task, in nanosecond intervals.

The GPU priority. Not used in Windows XP and The task priority, ranging from 1 low to 8 high. Note for tasks with Scheduling Category of "High", this value is always treated as 2.

Reference: Multimedia Class Scheduler Service. The TCP Congestion Control Algorithm controls how well, and how fast your connection recovers from network congestion, packet loss, and increase in latency. For more info se our Windows 10 Tweaks article. It is aimed to decrease retransmissions. In essence, ECN assumes that the cause of any packet loss is router congestion. It allows routers experiencing congestion to mark packets and allow clients to automatically lower their transfer rate to prevent further packet loss.

The receiver echoes the congestion indication to the sender, which must react as though a packet drop were detected. Possible settings are: enabled, disabled, default restores the state to the system default. Default state: disabled Recommendation: "enabled" for gaming only with routers that support it, after testing. Disable for pure throughput with no packet loss. Its effect on bulk throughput with large TCP Window are less clear.

Currently, we only recommend enabling this setting in the presence of packet loss, with ECN-capable routers. Its effects should be tested. We also recommend using ECN if you are enabling the CoDel scheduling algorithm to combat bufferbloat and reduce latency.

Some EA multiplayer games that require a profile logon do not support ECN yet you will not be able to logon. Note that if supported, ECN can reduce latency in some games with ECN-capable routers in the presence of packet loss dropped packets. Receive Segment Coalescing RCS is able to collect packets that are received during the same interrupt cycle and put them together so that they can be more efficiently delivered to the network stack.

While this reduces CPU utilization and improves thorughput, it can also have a negative impact on latency. That is why we recommend you disable it where latency is more important than throughput. Possible states: enabled, disabled, default. Default state: disabled Recommended: disabled for pure gaming latency, enabled for better throughput.

To enable using netsh:. Notes: Only supported by some network adapters. May need "Checksum Offload" enabled as well to work. Large Send Offload lets the network adapter hardware to complete data segmentation, rather than the OS. Different network adapters will support different functionalities. Now, click on Jumbo Frame from the list. Enabling Jumbo Frames based on the desired maximum transmission unit or MTU from the dropdown list on the right will make your network more efficient and increase the throughput.

The only downside to this is that all the devices in the network need to have jumbo frames enabled at the same MTU. Otherwise, it would lead to packet loss and in turn hamper your connection. Disabling Flow Control might help with the increase in the efficiency of traffic regulation for connections. Disabling it should reduce timeouts and improve throughput. Side scaling allows your system to distribute all the receive data processing to multiple processors or processor cores.

If this is disabled, the burden of processing the receive data will fall on a single core and go on to affect system cache utilisation. Some adapters might support RSS queue settings. It would be best to choose two queues that will ensure good throughput and low CPU utilisation. This is where you can do some trial and error if more than two queues are supported.

If the CPU utilisation is high, then you should stick to two queues. You can choose the speed of your network adapter along with the communication type. If your adapter supports Gigabit speeds, it will automatically appear in the dropdown list. Otherwise, the maximum speed visible would be Mbps. Besides the speed, there are a few other options: Full duplex two-way simultaneous communication or half-duplex one-way communication.

We would recommend you to set the highest possible speed in the full duplex mode. The interrupt moderation rate will determine how often the adapter interrupts the system to manage all the incoming and outgoing packets. Setting the rate at high or low has its own advantages and disadvantages. At a higher rate, the CPU utilisation drops to give you better machine performance at the cost of less responsive packet handling.

Get the most out of your Windows 10 network and game performance. With these tweaks you can significantly reduce latency in multiple online games and online applications. Additionally it generally improves system performance as it relates to internet related activities. You will need access to the administrator account or administrative privileges. The new implementation works much better by default than previous Windows versions with broadband internet connections and is able to adjust many values on the automatically.

However, there is room for improvement and you can adjust some values to better meet your use of your system. The settings, as well as their default and recommended state are explained below.

This will display a list of interfaces, and their respective MTU values. As with everything on this site, You are responsible for your own actions. See Evilware. Setting this seems to have no effect, since auto-tuning uses the TCP scale factor and changes it on the fly, disregarding this setting.

NetDMA enables support for advanced direct memory access. For the sake of completeness, the Killer NIC also has Double Shot Pro that is designed to use internet access from two sources simultaneously, such as broadband from an ISP and municipal Wi-Fi for a user fortunate enough to have two sources of broadband simultaneously.

Native Windows can only make a single internet connection at a time with non Killer hardware. In the few instances where you have two discreet Internet connections, however, there is a clear advantage to using it. While the preceding theoretical discussion is all well and good, we got our hands on some gaming hardware to test these concepts.

The open question for us was if a modern gaming router with QoS activated would be sufficient for managing and prioritizing the network traffic for a smooth gaming experience, and what difference, if any, the Killer NIC would make in this setting. The laptop was connected to the router over a wireless 5 GHz connection. The game was a first person shooter, the classic Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault that was played at x with Hardware Texture 2.

Gamers care much more about frames per second than about theoretical network benchmarks, so we're using FRAPS 3. This gives us a good idea of standard performance for a gaming notebook, and we found it was capable of playing the game at a healthy average A recent speed upgrade from our ISP to 60 Mbps proved a challenge for the test as we now needed to congest the network to compromise the game.

We decided to do this with background streaming video from YouTube, and it took five streams of 4K video and an additional p video for good measure, which was about 60 Mbps. This saturated our download bandwidth, essentially leaving the game with 5 to 8 Mbps of over-provisioning from the cable connection. With six background videos playing at once, Medal of Honor dragged to a lousy average of The game also stuttered and hiccuped to near unplayable levels.

With the average frame rate down 67 percent from the baseline, and we could now see what router QoS and Killer NIC could do to help the situation.

Dynamic QoS was turned on with default settings, which considers online gaming tier two of the four. When the test was run with dynamic QoS, it disappointingly had a virtually negligible effect with the average frame rate at a still too low For the next test, we switched to manual QoS and changed the online gaming category from high to highest, putting it into the top tier.