this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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Steam Deck

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[Help] Big increase of rubber-banding while playing online multiplayer games in the past week. (self.steamdeck)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by sleepingoddish to c/[email protected]
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Hey there, in the past week I've noticed my steam deck having way more issues with rubber-banding while playing online multiplayer games. I tested the same games on a laptop and no issues there. The steam deck is up to date as well. Any other ideas where I can check to see what might be causing this issue?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Just a wild guess: are you using the 5ghz or 2.4ghz Wifi? 5ghz is way faster but very fidgety with larger distance to the router, walls in the way or other routers nearby.

So, maybe you can troubleshoot your way out:

  • play as close as possible to the router using 5ghz and see if problems persist
  • check if changing to 2ghz makes a difference
  • use a network analyser on your phone to check if others use the same band as you, which might disrupt your connection. If so, check your router settings to change band to another one

Good luck!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Another good network troubleshooting step is to simply restart the router by unplugging the power cable for 30 or so seconds. It can fix many network related issues with little to no effort and is good practice for security reasons as well. (Restarting the router will effectively close any malware running in router and as long as the router doesn’t start them again after restart, you’ll be safe until your router is again compromised.)

Have you recently moved the router to new location or moved objects around the router? Check the router’s environment for any metal objects. They can cause significant interference. And then there are dead spots. Regardless where inside a building you place Wi-Fi access point, somewhere within its range there is most likely at least one spot where the signal cancels itself.

If the router’s location or “gaming location” has not changed, the reason most likely is that the channel used by the router has become congested. For both 2.4GHz and 5GHz there are recommended channels one should use, and you should choose the one that is least used around you. ~~There are no tools for iOS devices that can help with that~~ because Apple has locked down the required functionality, so use either computer or Android. EDIT: Apple’s AirPort Utility has this functionality after you enable it in Settings app.

5GHz is better for gaming due to better latency. But if you can’t play close enough to the router, 2.4GHz might provide more stable connection.

[–] sleepingoddish 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hi, no the router has not been moved recently. With the way this place has been built there aren’t many good places to put the gateway. I got an extender too but that doesn’t seem to help. What program do you recommend for the computer to see how congested these two bands are?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

NetSpot and InSSIDer are often recommended. I also noticed that Apple’s AirPort Utility (iOS) can show channels and signal strength of nearby networks. You need to turn on a setting in the Settings app to enable that feature. But it doesn’t have a clear UI that would help you to figure out the best channels.

Wi-Fi extenders are usually worthless. If you want to extend your network you should use mesh network.

Another thing that helps with interference is lowering the channel width. Using wider channels gives better throughput but there will be more interference. If you don’t transfer much data between your devices wirelessly and you don’t have some crazy fast internet connection, setting the channel width to the lowest for both bands is the safest option.

[–] sleepingoddish 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How much should I limit channel width? For example: the 5 GHz is at 80 MHz by default, would I lower it to 40 MHz? Or go even lower to 20? I live with other people so would lowering the channel width cause problems for everyone connecting to the internet?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Channel width is a router setting so it affects everyone who connects to that router. With 40 MHz channel width the maximum connection speed of 5 GHz network is between 150 and 300 Mbps, depending on which Wi-Fi version the router and devices support. If your internet connection happens to be 100 Mbps, it wouldn’t benefit having a faster Wi-Fi connection. Except that the connection quality affects the connection speed, so that 150 Mbps might be less than 100 Mbps if the device is far from the router or the connection is bad for some other reason. The connection speed is important only when downloading or uploading big files. For typical web browsing, video streaming and gaming the connection speed of few tens of Mbps is sufficient. DNS resolving speed for web browsing and ping for gaming are much more important than connection speed.

There’s probably no need to set the 5 GHz channel width to lower than 40 MHz unless the 5 GHz band is really crowded around you. 2.4 GHz should ~~almost~~ always be set to 20 MHz if there are other Wi-Fi networks.

[–] sleepingoddish 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks, I’ll force the steam deck to only use the 2.4ghz band with this wifi and see how that works out. This place put the gateway connection in one corner and I’m on the other side of the house.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

First, I would go to https://packetlosstest.com/ on your deck in desktop mode and see if it shows any issues. They have some game presets you can pick to hopefully test network traffic use similar to the games you're having issues with.

Once you have a baseline test of how your internet is performing, some basic things to try to improve it are:

  • Reboot deck and wifi router.
  • Switch between 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz
  • Try playing closer to the router and see if the lag goes away.
  • Disable the wifi power management setting on the deck

Even if nothing has changed with the Deck and router, it's possible another device in the house is causing interference, especially on 2.4Ghz networks. If the problem is something else causing interference, it can be really confusing to troubleshoot from the network side of things because the problems will be very intermittent.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Why would a racing game work differently on Deck vs a PC?

[–] sleepingoddish 1 points 2 months ago

It shouldn’t but I was checking to see if I had the same issues on pc that I saw on Steam Deck.