[Help] Counter Strike 2 extreme jitter (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by some_random_nick@lemmy.world to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml

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Hi everyone
I have had really bad jitter in CS2 for about 3 months now. Last year the game worked flawlessly, but now it is slowly becomming unplayable. I don't know when the issues started as I had a longer hiatus with the game. The frame rate is stable, only packet problems. I don't have any other FPS games to compare it to. Loading and using regular web pages works just fine.

It seems that there might be compounding issues. Things I noticed contribute to more jitter:

Pihole (default setup CouldFlare DNS, both IPv4 and v6)
Fedora kernel
x11 session

What I tried:

switching to an older kernel 6.15.9 -> 6.14.9
using CachyOS kernel (reduces jitter, but causes serious issues with Electron apps)
switching from Wayland (the default) to x11
using Gamescope
verifying game files
disabling Pihole and unpluggin it from the network altogether

My setup:
Fedora 42 with latest updates and kernel 6.15.9, CachyOS kernel 6.16.1
Ryzen 2700 and RX6600, 32GB RAM

I have no idea what to do next. The internet doesn't offer any solutions and everything I have tried so far does absolutely nothing. It could just be a bug in CS2 itself, but it's strange that almost noone is reporting it. Any suggestions?
Thanks!

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[-] taaz@biglemmowski.win 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

by jitter you mean ping lags/unstable ping?

remove all wireless connections between you and the internet if you can
in terminal, run ping against few different targets (to your gateway IP, to some random website/IP) and watch for packet drops, if you see them you might have a hardware problem (mb eth card/port, cable, router) or your ISP is having problems
check that your cable/router has correctly negotiated the wire speeds: ethtool <your-internet-interface-name:eth0> | grep -A1 Speed this will show you the speed (at least 100Mb/s) and Duplex: Full
maybe try changing cl_interp_ratio ?
run bufferbloat test
you sure noone is watching 4k corn while you are gaming ?

[-] some_random_nick@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

An update on this whole issue. Since nothing worked I got really pissed and installed CachyOS on a spare drive. Lo' and behold, the jitter is almost non-existent. Now I am even more perplexed.

[-] some_random_nick@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

I don't use any wireless connecticity for my PC, just a plain old ethernet cable.
The ping test was fine. 176 packets received, 0% lost, only 3-4 outliers with 150ms, average 15ms.
ethtool was fine 1000mbps and full. Bufferbloat was fine too, 20ms.
I'll try cl_interp_ratio tomorrow and report back.
Noone is wwtching anything in 4k, maybe some YT on phone (I have cable).
One site that gave me some bad results was packetlosstest. Someone on reddit suggested using it to test some CS preset. No lost packets, but about 8-10% are late (more than 40ms).

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

Make sure your power profile is set to 'performance'.

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 4 points 1 month ago

You could try forcing the Windows version by selecting Proton for compatibility in Steam in the game settings.

[-] some_random_nick@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

If nothing else works, I'll have to give it a try

[-] some_random_nick@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Tried rhat today with various Proton versions. Only Sniper lets me play a game, other complain about not being VAC compatible. But sadly neither of them help with jitter. I tried even Proton-GE, but also not VAC compatible...

[-] warmaster@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Try Bazzite, test without any additional stuff like pihole.

[-] some_random_nick@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I was on Bazzite prior to Fedora. I switched to Fedora because I couldn't get Bazzite to compile some code because of missing dependecies, which I couldn't install for some unknown reason. Noone on they Discord knew why, so I had to give it up.

[-] warmaster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

What software were you trying to install?

[-] some_random_nick@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I wanted to compile mimalloc. Not sure which dependencies were missing, but I couldn't install them. So I had to copy them over from another distro, but after that the linker couldn't find them. Seems like too much effort for some basic functionallity as I did the same in Fedora in less than one minute.

[-] warmaster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

You can use boxbuddy which is bundled with bazzite to compile it for any distro, however without knowing your end goal I can't give you a proper suggestion.

[-] some_random_nick@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I installed CachyOS on a spare drive and the jitter is almost gone. Just a few hickups here and there, but about 10x better out of the box. Now I am just confused. Fedora used to work perfectly fine!

this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025

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