Vertical rubber-band "lag"

[Ausdoerrt]

Hi folks, wanted to see if anyone else has had the same issue as me, and maybe I'm missing something in terms of my video options / connection to make it go away.

The problem is as follows: vertical movement can cause tearing, stutter and/or rubber-banding, particularly if something else is going on at the same time. Particularly bad if water is also involved. Horizontal movement is no problem, even running at fairly high gfx settings.

When it occurs: shooting while jumping in and out of water, feather-falling and generally jumping to/from big heights, jumping and shooting. Particularly annoying when it happens on platforming puzzles (can snap back to empty space and fall).

I've tried turning off the DX11 water to solve the water side of the problem, and it sorta helped but not really, the issue still occurs.

Any ideas?



P.S. The laptop has 8 GB RAM and 1GB VRAM, runs Witcher 3 and mid-high settings, surely should be enough for DDO.

[J1NG]

What you've described doesn't sound like it's a graphical issue, but either more DDO engine related issue, or a connection issue.

Are you playing over WIFI? And what is your connection "supposed" to be like? What it was sold to you as? FTTH/FTTB gigabit symetrical? VDSL2/FTTC 40+ Mbps?

J1NG

[SiliconScout]

What's your video card? Turning off post-processing might give you a little help, water in DDO is particularly hard on graphics cards, not sure why though.

[Ausdoerrt]

The card is GeForce GTX 950M, with 1GB VRAM.

As I mentioned, turning off DX11 water kinda helped specifically for the water situations, but then again, the issue occurs with other vertical stuff as well, e.g. when jumping pits in monkey in DQ1.

-------

The connection's supposed to be decent as well. Speedtest just gave me 22 Mbps down / 42 Mbps up with a random US server. Could it be a ping issue, seeing as I'm located in Europe and DDO servers are (presumably) in the US?

And yes, I'm playing over WiFi.

It does "feel" more like a connection issue, since the game tends to "rubberband" me randomly on vertical jumps, kinda like when the bad kind of "lag" hits, but less severe.

[J1NG]

Try switching to a wired connection temporaily and report back on how that feels. I have a sneaky feeling it's your WIFI that's no good and causing all the latency (and you rubber banding like that).

J1NG

[Ausdoerrt]

Just tried that. While a direct connection almost doubled the up/down speed according to Speedtest, there was no noticeable change in the issue (tested in Forgotten Caverns, first pool when you jump down).

Turning off all/most of post-processing didn't make much difference either.

[Riddle_of_Steel]

Just tried that. While a direct connection almost doubled the up/down speed according to Speedtest, there was no noticeable change in the issue (tested in Forgotten Caverns, first pool when you jump down).

Turning off all/most of post-processing didn't make much difference either.

If I recall the 950m came out about 3.5 years ago and would have been considered a solid mid-range cards at the time, since it's a Mobile card it wouldn't run quite as fast though. From that perspective it should handle DDO just fine, maybe not maxed out on all settings but it should be able to look pretty nice and run OK. You should go to your advanced graphics settings and make sure that you have checked off Sync with Refresh Rate. More often than not tearing is because the refresh rates are not matching well, though saying that you usually notice it more with horizontal movement and I am not sure refresh rate issues would cause rubber banding.

If that doesn't help make sure you have the most updated drivers from Nvidia, don't trust windows to keep the drivers up to date.

If that doesn't help then you could try this, it likely won't "fix" the issue but it might help you determine what it is.

Type in CMD and tell it to run as administrator
then run tracert 198.252.160.94


That will run a tracert to the Thelanis server (it's the one I am currently logged into so it's the IP I got right now)

See what it looks like for the hops getting to there. You should have a pretty consistent speed all the way down until it finished with nothing but timeouts. My guess is that the router on their end is either configured to dump these requests or too busy as tracert is a very low priority traffic request.

In my case I get 13 hops and all of them under 90ms. So my connection is pretty stable and I certainly haven't seen anything strange in game.

If your times are kind of up and down all over the place or consistently high then it could indicate routing issues between you and the host. Also if you get a LOT of hops that could be the same thing.

In my case the first 3 are just getting through my ISP then I get a naked IP and them I am into cogent's network with 6 hops in there, then off to Qwest.net and then 2 naked IP's which I am going to guess is into the actual server rackspace that houses the VM's Considering I am jumping through a pretty big network (Cogent) and to a high availability VM environment I would say 13 hops isn't too bad. If you have more than that, especially if it's a LOT more than that then you are likely looking at a key node between you and DDO having issues that is causing you to route around it.

If you have about the same number of hops with a similar or better set of times then it's not network. It could be server lag and if so it's usually either instance or disk accessed based. If it's instanced then going to a new area or quest should have cleaned that up, if it's disk access on the server side you would think a lot more people would be complaining but it's always possible that other's just have come to accept it and can't be bothered to post.

If I were you and the trace looks fine I would tune the game down the the absolute minimum and then turn on / up features one at a time until you can find the best settings in each area that don't cause issues. Since you notice it on vertical movement (falling I assume being the main culprit I would start with the draw distance and move on from there. It's tedious but at this point it's the only way I can think of that might help you determine the actual issue in the end.

OH and if you are running windows 10 .. good lord do this first actually ... you need to turn off that dang gaming bar it causes SO many problems and DDO in particular seems to get kicked by it hard. My card is a 1070 Ti and I noticed a large drop in performance when that stupid bar was active. To get to it you need to go to the Windows logo >> Settings (the gear) >> Gaming

Good luck man

[Ausdoerrt]

Thanks a ton for the informative post! Indeed, it's not the kind of issue that I'd consider "game-breaking" in any way, but it can certainly get annoying at times, so I figured I'd dig into it.

If I recall the 950m came out about 3.5 years ago and would have been considered a solid mid-range cards at the time, since it's a Mobile card it wouldn't run quite as fast though. From that perspective it should handle DDO just fine, maybe not maxed out on all settings but it should be able to look pretty nice and run OK.

If Task Manager is anything to go by, DDO takes up about 50% of RAM and no more than 70% VRAM with settings close to maxxed out. So it should be fine.

You should go to your advanced graphics settings and make sure that you have checked off Sync with Refresh Rate. More often than not tearing is because the refresh rates are not matching well, though saying that you usually notice it more with horizontal movement and I am not sure refresh rate issues would cause rubber banding.

I did try that first thing, and it does make things look a bit different - definitely helps with horizontal tearing, but it's only really noticeable in big open areas. No effect on the vertical "lag", though.

If that doesn't help make sure you have the most updated drivers from Nvidia, don't trust windows to keep the drivers up to date.

Come think of it, there was an update recently. Can't hurt to try.

Type in CMD and tell it to run as administrator
then run [B]tracert 198.252.160.94

Thanks for this! Will try tonight and report back. Any idea what the address for Khyber would be?

OH and if you are running windows 10 .. good lord do this first actually ... you need to turn off that dang gaming bar it causes SO many problems and DDO in particular seems to get kicked by it hard. My card is a 1070 Ti and I noticed a large drop in performance when that stupid bar was active. To get to it you need to go to the Windows logo >> Settings (the gear) >> Gaming

I have NOT heard about this one, I'll definitely check if it's still on for some reason.

[Knobull]

You may want to check that windows is not throttling the cpu when it shouldn't: www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/492519-When-Are-You-Going-To-Fix-The-Freezing?p=6049975&viewfull=1#post6049975

Also see my WiFi rant on page 2 of that thread. You need to know your packet loss stats, wired or not.

[Ausdoerrt]

Wow, seriously, screw Windows 10. Thanks for another tip!

As for WiFi, I'm looking at gettin a better router, but as noter earlier, switching to wired didn't make much of a difference, so it's likely something else. I'll run some network tests tonight and see what comes up, but I've a sinking feeling that this is related to "bad" geography / ping times.

If I get a chance, I'll also double-check on another laptop that's running Windows 8 and has an SSD.

[Ausdoerrt]

OK, reporting back.

On game bar: I had the brain to have it permanently off already, so that's not an issue.

On power settings: I was actually on "balanced", with minimum power at 5%. Go figure.

NVidia drivers: up to date.

On WiFi: getting a new 802.11ac router tomorrow, will report back.

So, with all of the above done (except the router), there hasn't been a significant change in the issue. Minor improvements overall maybe, but difficult to quantify.

On "tracert" command: I think this is where the issue lies. Looks like at some point I'm hitting a roadblock, with a significant increase in ping. Tried both your address for Thelanis, as well as what Google claims is the address for Khyber (74.201.106.23) - more connections and worse ping, actually. Same multiple jumps through Cogento.com. Perhaps this is the trans-Atlantic jump? Not sure what, if anything, can be done about this.

 1     2 ms     2 ms     1 ms  192.168.0.1
  2     2 ms     3 ms     2 ms  10.0.255.255
  3     3 ms     7 ms     5 ms  194.33.189.21
  4     2 ms     2 ms     2 ms  kiev-nt-b1-ae8-vlan3138.fiord.net [62.140.239.18]
  5    31 ms    31 ms    31 ms  frankfurt-nt-b1-ae5-vlan2036.fiord.net [62.140.243.22]
  6    34 ms    31 ms    31 ms  be4443.259.nr21.b015761-2.fra06.atlas.cogentco.com [149.6.140.141]
  7    31 ms    34 ms    31 ms  154.25.9.45
  8    34 ms    33 ms    31 ms  be2846.ccr42.fra03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.37.29]
  9    38 ms    41 ms    38 ms  be2814.ccr42.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com [130.117.0.141]
 10   143 ms   144 ms   147 ms  be12266.ccr42.par01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.56.174]
 11   151 ms   150 ms   150 ms  be12489.ccr42.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.57.69]
 12   149 ms   149 ms   148 ms  be2491.ccr22.lpl01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.39.117]
 13   146 ms   149 ms   149 ms  be3043.ccr22.ymq01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.44.166]
 14   146 ms   146 ms   147 ms  be2104.ccr22.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.43.22]
 15   143 ms   143 ms   151 ms  be2879.ccr22.cle04.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.29.173]
 16   147 ms   144 ms   143 ms  be2718.ccr42.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.7.129]
 17   149 ms   146 ms   143 ms  be2766.ccr41.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.46.178]
 18   153 ms   172 ms   155 ms  qwest.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.13.94]
 19   154 ms   153 ms   153 ms  ewr-cntr-12.inet.qwest.net [205.171.17.6]
 20   158 ms   153 ms   153 ms  206.103.215.54
 21   155 ms   153 ms   153 ms  63.236.3.130
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.

[Ausdoerrt]

And so I also ditched my old TPLink router and replaced it with a dualband gigabit Xiaomi router. Helped a lot with connection speed and quality, and resolved just about all loading / connection lag issues in DDO, EXCEPT the one in the OP. Still rubber-banding when jumping out of water as well as doing some other jumps.

Actually, forgot to mention another instance of this mysterious "lag" - air jets! Makes quests like The Pit, SitH and some others a huuuuuge pain to complete. The jet actually "teleports" me instantly to a random point in space, and I have no control over the direction or trajectory of the jump. Similar issue also applies to FvS "wings" and all "Abundant Step"-like abilities.

So, if anyone has any ideas what I can do to help this, please let me know. Cheers!