Ping Spikes in Team Fortress 2

I am currently using a Toshiba Sattelite A305-S6837. I have onboard graphics and I am using Intel 4965AGN wireless card. I have an Intel Core 2 Duo T5550 @ 1.83 GHz processor with 4GB of DDR2 Ram.

Whenever I play Team Fortress 2, I get periodic ping spikes. The frame rate remains the same, but my ping jumps up beyond 200 ms when a normal ping is between 20 and 50 ms for my computer. I'm not confident that it is my graphics card because it runs Counter-Strike: Source just fine and I haven't noticed any frame rate changes when the ping spikes occur. I have already put Team Fortress 2 on to the lowest settings whereas Counter-Strike: Source runs on the highest settings.

I have tried playing using an ethernet cable with more than 10M of bandwidth and I have tried wirelessly with 2400 kbps of bandwidth and the problem persisted during both trials. I have also tried disabling all firewalls and the problem continued. Diagnostics please??

 

I had the same problem twice but two things were causing it

1. I left Outlook going and I got a spike everytime it checked for emails

2. Another time I had it was when my wireless was searching for other networks (still not sure why) but a little program called WLAN Optimiser fixed it for me

 

I tried both things sadly neither one helped

 

It's likely a limitation of your internet connection.

 

Try a different server, maybe the one you are playing on has some roadbumps on the line to get there, whereas the CSS server you play on doesn't.

 

I get the same problem! for CS its normal at pings of ~40 but when i play TF2 my ping is at like 250~ and the screen stutters and lags.

 

Might be your ingame settings. Check your config.cfg file (or use the in-game console) and autoexec and check that your rate settings arent too low.

They should be the same as your cs ones..

dependant on your connection rate should be over 15000,
cl_cmdrate and cl_updaterate are also important and should be over 80 at least.

 

Actually, TF2 is a 66tic game so cl_cmdrate and cl_updaterate should be 66 and for most people, rate 25000 should be the sweet spot.

If the ping spikes always happen where there is lots of action, then it is likely your rates. I think TF2 defaults them to like 10 instead of 66... I know mine were really low by default for some reason and changing this cleared up a lot of lag.

 

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=810819

try that