- League of Legends has notoriously had massive lag spikes seemingly at random
- These could be linked to mice with high framerates, shader settings, and frame capping
- The devs said they are working on it, but did not give specific end dates
Riot devs recently asked League fans to help them gather data to figure out why the game suffers huge lag spikes, and it seems there are finally some answers.
Devs Discover Reason for Lag
For as long as online games have existed, connection troubles have been the bane of players (or their excuse if they don’t perform well). Like many other titles League of Legends is not immune to lag. In fact, the game has often been plagued by severe lag spikes that have caused entire matches to be ruined.
The battle to optimize the connection between players is always continuing and it seems there has recently been a breakthrough as Riot devs have pointed out they may have found the reason for LoL’s huge lag spikes. In a recent discussion on Reddit about the problem, RiotTony talked about some of the reasons behind the game’s random FPS drops. According to the dev team, lag spikes could be connected to mice with high framerates, shader settings, and frame capping.
The thread, initially started by RiotTony as a plea to the LoL community to help the devs gather data on the lag spikes, resulted in the team linking the above-mentioned factors to big FPS drops. Although the devs don’t yet know why these factors cause lag, they warned players about them nevertheless.
“For example, we've recently discovered that mice with very high update frequencies can actually cause the game to slow down,” RiotTony wrote. “Not sure why yet, but at the moment there is no benefit in having a mouse which updates faster than your frame rate, so dial it back and you'll get better performance.”
RiotTony also warned players about using shaders as they may also interfere with the smooth running of the game. “Shaders should all be precompiled – what you might be seeing is files being loaded mid game,” he wrote, explaining that this shouldn’t normally happen, but that it sometimes slips through.
Last, but not least, the Riot dev explained that frame capping could also be blamed for League of Legends’ lag problems. He said that the team will take a look into it, but warned that he does not know when updates will come. “End game input will still be limited by frame rate – we’d be better off optimizing the bottlenecks there and just relying on a better frame rate,” RiotTony wrote.
Connection issues are an inevitable problem that all online games face, no matter big or small. But let’s hope that LoL’s most recent issues will be fixed soon thanks to the gathered data.
