"lag" in online games with Windows 7

Hi there, I've recently had an extremely annoying issue regarding sound, games, multiplayer, and Windows 7. When I would start up a game (such as Counter-Strike Source or Heroes of Newerth) and connect to server, my fps and ping would be nominally OK, but the game would lag. In HoN this would be displayed by the heroes moving jerkily around the map, even though my fps and ping were good. In Counter Strike, this evidenced itself by glitchy nades that don't bounce smoothly, and whenever sounds are played, the ping spikes a bit. It's kind of like playing on a 33 tic server, for those of you familiar with the game. None of these issues occurred in single player games or in the aforementioned games with a local server. Symptoms included warping, skipping, and lagging while moving or viewing other players move.

Anyway, I searched and searched here and couldn't find anything, but finally I found something in Google (note: this is only a partial fix, don't do this, see update):

• Stop and disable the "Multimedia Class Scheduler" service
• Run regedit and go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Audiosrv"
• Double click on the entry "DependOnService" and delete the line with "MMCSS" from the text box
• Reboot and enjoy lag free games

I diagnosed the issue by realizing that by disabling audio devices in device manager, lag would disappear in-game. So glad I found this solution after installing 6 different audio drivers and generally being very frustrated. Just thought I'd leave this here as a reference for others with a similar issue.

Update: doing this will likely induce audio issues such as crackling, popping, stuttering, and skipping. My final solution was to leave this service enabled but disable it's network throttling component (if you already did the first fix you should undo it and re-enable the service). This resolved my audio issues caused by disabling the MMCS while keeping my games lag free. This is not a solution if you are not experiencing network issues. If you are experiencing audio issues only, you should make sure the MMCSS is running. The best way to test if you have this problem is to disable your sound device in Device Manager and then see if the lag persists. If it does, you have some other issue. If the lag goes away, re-enable your sound device and try the following fix:

Leave the multimedia class scheduler service running, but disable its network throttling "feature":

• Open regedit
• Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile
• There will be an entry for network performance throttling, default value is 10; set it to FFFFFFFF hex (willl look like 0xFFFFFFFF to the right of the entry)
• Reboot

Here are some example threads where this fix was useful:
Counter-Strike Series & Windows 7 = Lag?
stuttering in games. (mainly valve)
High Ping and Choke in Windows 7 (CSS/TF2)

Games affected:
Source Engine Games (Team Fortress 2 (TF2), Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Counter Strike Source (CS:S, CSS))
Heroes of Newerth (HoN)
Call of Duty Series (CoD), possibly including Modern Warfare
Overlord Series (Overlord, Overlord: Raising Hell, Overlord 2)

Post if you find another game that's affected so I can add it to this list!

For those interested, here are some articles on the MMCSS:
http://courtneymalone.com/2007/08/28...network-speed/
http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/...slowdowns.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...8VS.85%29.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussino...7/1833290.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948066
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multime...eduler_Service

pinstripe said:

i have my sound at dvd quality. did you try disabling the mmcss service like i said in my first post? you're not being very clear about what problem you're experiencing.

How do you disable that exactly? I am having issues in dungeon fighter online with the audio clipping out even when the game audio is turned off and I am listening to an mp3 in creative media source. It also causes media source to error and stop playing the music at certain points which makes me think the issue is coming from a process being improperly prioritized where the audio takes the low end of the priority and then has an issue.

I found it in the services and disabled it I will report back if it corrects the issue or not.

pinstripe said:

eventually, i found a way to disable network throttling while leaving the service enabled, which seems to be the optimal solution, since otherwise you get cackling, skipping sound.

What was your FINAL (Optimal) solution?? What did you do??