Thank you so much for your response, Kaldaien!
Your theory makes a lot of sense. This would mean that one of the game’s APIs is not working as intended and is losing sync, I suppose? I have meddled with Windows Timers and have tried several variants of hardware timers and synthetic timers, HPET, RTC, TSC, etc. All with no success. The problem must lie in the game itself, then, I suppose. Any way to diagnose this? Find the buffer that fills up?
Considering your theory about bufferbloat. I have benchmarked my network quite extensively. Tried QoS and set the game to the highest priority. When I game, the only device running is my PC and my phone. My PC has any kind of windows update disabled and I am very tedious with unnecessary programs or services running in the background. I even tried putting my phone to airplane mode, because I have dug so far, that I am starting to encounter tin foil hat solutions to my problem. People are naming EMI or “dirty power” as causes.
I even modded my bios, eliminating spread spectrum and any kind of power down, latency tolerance, C-States, P-States and power saving mechanisms, you name it.
My PC runs absolutely great now, just not my game.
Another person suggested that ISPs coalesce packets without my consent and that I am more or less playing round-robin with my neighbours. The game uses UDP, like most shooters.
I also disassembled the game’s EXE and some DLLs to maybe find a clue, without luck. Possibly because I don’t know the two languages that were used: Python and C.
Do you think it might be beneficial to use a program like process hacker to change thread priorities? Anticheat is not an issue. I have the game running with a slightly lower priority to give some breathing room to the services.
My game is a bit like an athlete at the paralympics. Highly optimized, but also handicapped.