DNS timeouts, game lag, ethernet issues...

My game has been having these issues (microstuttering, issues with the game's physics, sound, and hit registration) for over 6 months intermittently but it suddenly got worse in the past 2 months.

The following is what happened right around the time the problems got way more consistent:

My motherboard has an intel ethernet card. It's a mini itx. Someone said they had general problems with Halo MCC and updating their wifi drivers fixed it for them. So I updated my ethernet drivers (I dont use wifi) but immediately after I did that, my internet stopped working. Pages would only partially load, or wouldnt load at all. I got DNS timeouts for reddit, duckduckgo. Youtube videos would just buffer endlessly. Come to find out that particular ethernet chip (Intel i225-V) has a ton of issues that have been going on for a couple of years with many people not able to use their internet at all, and for some people updating their drivers "breaks" something. For me, I could turn my PC on and it would work for a few minutes then would break and do the things I listed. Strangely, the Ookla speedtest website NEVER timed out, even when no other websites would load I could access it and additionally my download/upload speeds were always perfectly fine.

Rolling back the drivers didn't fix it, reinstalling Windows didnt fix it, etc. I ended up buying a new board and a new processor (I switched from AMD to intel), but unfortunately that board had the same ethernet chip and upon installing it and reinstalling windows, my ethernet still didnt work.
(At one point I rolled back the drivers, and disconnected the ethernet cord and the moment I plugged it back again in my pc BSOD'd. It was like plugging the cord in caused the blue screen...) I tried reinstalling Windows, 10, 11, multiple ssds, multiple psus, gpus, ram, etc.

I actually never really fixed this problem but it sort of resolved itself. What happened was I ran Linux off a thumbdrive and my internet worked fine there, and when I booted back into Windows it suddenly worked again.. I messed with it for another week and despite my internet continuing to work fine my game still had the same problems (I was hoping the switch to an Intel processor might have fixed it), so I returned that board and cpu, then connected my AMD board that also had the intel ethernet chip and the internet still worked fine.

My game still had problems and I wanted to try an external ethernet card (there isnt room on that board for one as it's a micro itx) so I had to pull out my older AsRock B450 mobo (which is what I'm on now,) and thats when I realized that nslookup was timing out, and obviously my game was still not working, which is when I first made this post.

So on the two itx boards my internet stopped working, with many websites giving me dns timeouts, and my older board, the at I fixed that particular issue with the batch file from earlier on in this thread, but it's all just weird as hell to me.

Personally I suspect maybe some sort of setting or bug is getting synced over automatically to me. I think I mentioned earlier in the thread that when Id format my drive and reinstall windows, despite not signing into the machine with a Microsoft account, all my store purchases would briefly be visible in the store. I was told on the eleven forums that Windows syncs data not just via your email signin but all based on hardware identifiers such as mac address, which has me wondering if something could be getting synced even accidentally and that's causing my problems.

What does every make of this?

Also, I forgot to include this for Bruce. My power supply is a 750w Asus Tuf bronze psu.

Bruce said:

and other PC's in the house have no internet issues?

what is the make/model of this external ethernet device?

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Well I did try my game on another computer here and after 20 mins it started doing the same stuff, but otherwise, for normal use- no one experiences any problems with the internet.

And the internal Ethernet card on this board, per the manufacturer's website, just says "Realtek Gigabit Lan" and the external pcie card is a TP-Link TG-3468 and according to the manual it uses Realtek's driver.


Also, since my last post I tried installing Windows 11 Ghost Spectre Superlite
Info: Removed security reasons Admin

Ghost spectre is a modded version of Windows that doesnt have bloatware and has telemetry disabled, and it's made for gamers and people with low-end machines. For example there is no Windows store or Xbox Game Bar, and instead of making you use a Microsoft account you just have a basic Administrator account like in older versions of Windows.

I installed the version with Windows Defender and my game actually played way better for a couple of hours over 2 days, and then the same issues with excessive microstutter, players vibrating, and game instability suddenly hit me again. I actually thought I fixed it to be honest.

It always seems to happen where I'll have one game where only a couple of questionable things happen, then the next game everything feels messed up for the entire game and every game after.

I know I've explained it a million times but for the sake of being thorough, the problem only seems to happen when there's an interaction with another player. For example I can go into a local custom game by myself and the game might have some small microstutters every now and then, not ideal but it doesnt really feel broken. But as soon as Im in a game with players, and I get into an interaction, the players just vibrate. It feels like a very tiny persistent amount of lag, or that the players characters and their animationz are stuck at 30hz or something much less than the 240hz I get. My fps never dips, there's no spike in network activity. It feels like when a player does an action such as jumps in front of me, it skips the frame where they jumped, so people just sort of appear places. Same thing if someone spins around and shoots me, it feels like the frame where they spun around is getting skipped.

Bruce said:

it all seems to be game related.

Win11 Superlite sounds flaky to me.
it's not a licensed Windows OS which probably means it's a Linux distro made to look like Windows.

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I actually spent the past 2 days trying another game, splitgate, and I have similar problems where my game microstutters when I get into an interaction or when another player near me performans an action