Clumsy.exe, desync/extrapolation, and a temporary solution

[Burtchnasty]

I’ve been obsessed, for the last 5-6 years, with trying to figure out why  ANY FPS game I play, I am constantly desync’d and being silently extrapolated (meaning, I am not getting any network icons indicating an issue, nor am I skipping around anywhere). The second one causes the most insane reverse peekers disadvantage that breaks aim assist, hit detection, and makes every gun fight a 40/60 chance. Basically, enemies see me come around corners on their screen before I’ve even come around the corner on my screen and the server validates it. The millisecond I move my left stick, it’s game over. Why? We’ll get to that. (I don’t know why it double spaced this paragraph)

During all this time I’ve built 3 PC’s, I’ve had 2 PS5s, an Xbox Series X, I’ve had fiber, cable, 3 5G services, Starlink, and my mobile hotspot and not ANY of them have ever made this issue go away permanently. I’ve probably got a dozen Activision accounts across all the platforms haha Now, interestingly, some of those ISP’s did improve the symptoms a little bit, mainly the mobile/satellite ones, and switching between any of them for the first time always resulted in 3-4 matches of flawless gameplay before the network conditions would start to degrade and the desync/silent extrapolation would return. 

When I tell you I’ve tried everything, I mean I’ve exhausted ChatGPT/Grok/Gemini to the point they’ve stopped giving me suggestions and tell me that I need to figure out how to cope with this or maybe stop playing these games. I just returned a 1400.00 UPS to Amazon yesterday in an attempt to claw myself out of a very deep rabbit hole. I’ve seriously tried it all. 

Funny enough, this isn’t the first time I’ve used Clumsy in an attempt to “fix” CoD. However, this was the first time I used it with a real understanding of what I needed and expected it to do…

And it works. Not flawlessly, but it works.

I live in a major US city, extremely close to two CoD servers that net me a 12-14ms ping with fiber depending on which server I connect to. My raw, very optimized fiber connection feels absolutely the worst of all the ISP’s I’ve played on from my home. That’s where Clumsy comes in. I set the parameters “outbound and UDP”, uncheck inbound, set the delay and watch the magic happen. 

Here’s what I think is happening: While all the testing that I can do shows a very stable latency, with less than 0.5ms of jitter up and down, I think there is actually some microjitter going on that eventually causes these games to buffer my connection. Combined with the lag compensation being afforded to a lot of other players except me, it leads to an experience that I think many of you are already aware of. 

What is clumsy doing? It’s adding a delay, albeit to every single packet of outbound information, to my Upload side and temporarily sweeping my microjitters or whatever under the rug. It’s not perfect, and I have to adjust the “delay” or lag as clumsy calls it, by anywhere from 15-40ms every single match. This artificially increases your latency, and by doing so, also can move you onto the right side of lag compensation. I can continuously adjust my “lag” based on the one enemy player I can’t kill until I find that sweet spot and then it’s advanced UAVs, and swarms from there on out. 

This sounds an awful lot like SteadyPing doesn’t it? Well it’s close-ish. 

AI summarized paragraph ahead: 

While both tools aim to counter aggressive lag compensation by artificially padding your latency, Clumsy is a basic, manual software clamp that blindly slaps a fixed, flat delay onto your outbound packets inside Windows, preserving (and often magnifying) your connection's natural micro-jitters while doubling processing overhead. In contrast, SteadyPing is an intelligent, hardware-level shock absorber running directly on the NetDuma R3 router that constantly tracks your server connection in real time; instead of a fixed delay, it dynamically expands or shrinks its buffer packet-by-packet to absorb your network's natural fluctuations, forcing your outbound data stream into a mathematically straight, perfectly jitter-free timeline. / End AI

I’ve gone ahead and ordered an R3 as my XR1000 has run its course. For the issue that i believe I am having, I think SteadyPing is going to be a deliverance from the agony that I’ve been coping with for a very, very long time. I do not have any expectations that lag compensation will forever be on my side as that is just unavoidable. But I do expect that it will fix the very real desync symptoms that I personally experience.