It runs, but it stutters or your shots land late

The distinction that saves the most time

Two numbers describe most of what people mean by lag, and almost every game shows both if you turn the display on.

Frame rate, in frames per second

How many images your computer draws each second. Low frame rate looks like jerkiness, tearing or slideshow movement, and it gets worse when more is happening on screen. Nothing about your internet connection affects it.

Ping, or latency, in milliseconds

How long a message takes to reach the server and return. High latency looks like a delay between your input and the result. The picture stays smooth — it is simply reporting a world that is slightly behind.

Packet loss, as a percentage

Data that never arrives. This is the one that produces vehicles teleporting, hits that do not register and brief freezes in an otherwise smooth session. Small percentages cause disproportionate disruption.

Smooth but delayed is a network problem. Jerky but responsive is a computer problem. Both at once usually means the machine is struggling and is also on Wi-Fi.

Raising a low frame rate

Change these in order, and test after each one. The first three cost nothing and account for most of the improvement people find.

1. Drop the preset, then raise individual settings

   Move the overall quality preset down one step and see whether the problem disappears. If it does, raise the settings you care about individually. This tells you which option is expensive on your hardware instead of leaving you guessing.

2. Lower the most expensive options first

   Shadow quality, anti-aliasing, effects detail and view distance usually cost the most frames for the least visible benefit at speed. Texture quality matters if your graphics hardware is short of memory. Resolution is the largest single lever and the last one worth pulling.

3. Close what is running behind the game

   Browsers with many tabs, video playing on a second monitor, streaming software and background file syncing all compete for the same resources. Close them for a test round rather than assuming they are free.

4. Check temperatures if it degrades over time

   A session that starts smooth and deteriorates after fifteen or twenty minutes is the signature of thermal throttling. Laptops on beds and couches, blocked vents and years of accumulated dust are the usual causes, and cleaning is the actual fix. No graphics setting compensates for a machine that cannot shed heat.

5. Update the graphics driver

   From the hardware manufacturer directly. Driver updates often bring genuine performance improvements for specific games, and an old driver is a plausible cause on its own.

Reducing latency, and accepting what you cannot

Some latency is a fixed cost of geography. A player in Australia connecting to a server in another hemisphere is paying for the distance the signal travels, and no setting removes it. Where the game lets you select a region, choosing the nearest one is by far the largest improvement available — larger than every other item on this list combined.

After that, in order of effect:

• Use a cable. Wi-Fi adds variability, and variability is worse for a game than a slightly higher but steady latency. This is the single most useful change most people can make.
• Check what else is using the connection. A large download or a cloud backup running in the background creates exactly the symptoms people blame on the game.
• Move closer to the router, or move the router. If a cable is genuinely impossible, distance and walls are the next biggest factors.
• Restart the router occasionally. Worth one attempt, not worth a ritual.
• Test at a different time of day. If evenings are consistently worse and mornings are fine, that is network congestion rather than anything you have configured.

Stutter that is not a low frame rate

One pattern deserves separating out, because it is diagnosed wrongly more often than anything else on this page: an average frame rate that reads perfectly well, punctuated by brief hitches.

The usual explanation is work happening during play rather than before it. Shaders compiling the first time a particular effect appears, textures being loaded from a slow drive as you move into a new area, and background programs waking up on a schedule all produce a momentary pause in an otherwise healthy session. A first session after installation or after a large update hitches more than later ones for exactly this reason, and it settles by itself.

What helps: letting the first session run long enough for caches to build, installing the game on the fastest drive available, and reducing texture quality if the graphics hardware is short of memory. What does not help: lowering every graphics setting to its minimum. If the average was already fine, the average was never the problem.

Isolating the problem properly

If the two categories still will not separate, a few deliberate tests will do it. Play a quieter moment of the game and watch whether the trouble disappears when less is on screen — that indicates frame rate. Watch whether other devices in the house also struggle at the same moments — that indicates the connection rather than the computer. Try a wired connection once, even temporarily, because it eliminates an entire variable in a single test. And note the time of day each time it happens, since a pattern across a week tells you more than an hour of settings changes.

If the connection itself consistently falls short of what you are paying for, that is a matter to raise with your provider. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission publishes information on broadband performance and on how services must be represented to consumers.