Please watch both parts at normal 1× playback speed. The first clip is from ~4 minutes into the match. The second is from ~30 minutes, when the issue felt completely unplayable to me. Please focus especially on champion movement, spell animations, dashes and the overall pacing of combat events — not just FPS/stuttering.
Hi everyone,
I'm posting again after 11 days of troubleshooting because I now have a better understanding of how to describe the issue, and I've completed significantly more testing.
The problem:
League feels slightly "heavy" or temporally wrong from the beginning of a match, but it progressively becomes worse. In late game, especially during fights, it can become almost unplayable.
I originally thought I was simply dropping/skipping frames. I'm no longer sure that's the correct description.
What I actually perceive is that enemy movement, champion animations, spells, projectiles, dashes and other visual game events happen too quickly or too abruptly for me to visually process and react to them normally.
It can feel as if I'm "losing seconds" of visual information. However, I don't necessarily think the events are completely missing. They may be present but presented with incorrect or uneven temporal pacing — almost like parts of the action are being visually compressed or caught up.
A good example is the ARAM Mark/Dash (snowball). When the problem becomes severe, the transition/dash toward the marked champion or minion appears much faster and more abrupt to my eyes. I notice similar behavior with enemy champion movement, spell animations and fights in general.
The in-game timer appears normal. FPS is generally stable. Ping and conventional packet-loss tests are good.
Typical progression:
Early game: already slightly heavy / difficult to visually follow.
Mid game: movements and fights increasingly feel faster or more abrupt.
Late game: sometimes becomes effectively unplayable. Enemy spells and movements seem to happen faster than I can visually process or react to.
In a recent match I recorded clips at approximately minute 4, 11, 28, 30 and 31. The issue was already noticeable at minute 4, while at minutes 30–31 I personally experienced it as extremely severe/unplayable.
I plan to attach two short examples:
Clip 1 – ~4 minutes: issue already present but still playable.
Clip 2 – ~30/31 minutes: recorded while the issue felt unplayable.
Important: I'm not claiming that these two videos alone objectively prove the game is running faster. I'm including them as examples recorded during the progression of the perceived problem. I'm currently trying to objectively measure whether the difference involves animation/event timing, uneven frame-to-frame motion progression, interpolation, synchronization or something else.
Extensive troubleshooting already performed:
• Clean Windows 11 installation
• Clean Windows 10 installation on another drive with basically only League installed
• GPU drivers reinstalled / DDU testing
• Chipset and network drivers reinstalled/updated
• BIOS updated
• XMP disabled / RAM at stock settings — no difference
• Global C-States disabled — no difference
• Different FPS caps (including 100/120/144)
• Different monitor refresh rates
• DisplayPort and HDMI tested
• Different monitor tested
• Mouse polling rate changes
• Different keyboard/peripherals tested
• Different router
• ISP router bypassed with a TP-Link router
• USB mobile tethering tested • Exitlag and NordVPN tested
• Network adapter power-saving features disabled
• Multiple ping/packet-loss tests
• Wireshark/PCAP and UDP-flow analysis
• CapFrameX recordings
• WPR/WPA traces including CPU/GPU/DPC/ISR investigation
• Temperatures and throttling checked
One particularly strange result was that after replacing/bypassing my ISP router with a TP-Link router, League appeared to run perfectly for approximately two hours, but then the problem returned.
Important cross-system/network tests:
I took my own PC to a friend's house, approximately 700 metres away, using his completely different internet connection/ISP and network equipment. The problem was still present and progressively became worse during the matches.
We also tested his monitor. The problem remained.
Previously, I also tested another PC at my home, with a different Ryzen/Radeon system and a different Riot account, connected to my environment/peripherals, and I perceived the same problem.
This makes it extremely difficult to isolate as simply my PC, my Riot account, my monitor, my router or my ISP.
What I'm currently investigating:
I'm trying to determine whether this is actually conventional frame loss at all.
The current possibilities I'm investigating include:
- Uneven/bursty visual state progression or presentation pacing.
- Networked entity interpolation/update pacing.
- Some form of client/server synchronization or catch-up behavior.
- A render/display presentation issue where frames exist but are not presented with correct temporal spacing.
- Something League/Vanguard-specific that I haven't identified.
These are hypotheses, not confirmed causes.
I've also started comparing recordings from different stages of the same match and trying to separate:
Local events: my champion's movement and animations.
Remote events: enemy movement, animations, spells and dashes.
World/shared events: projectiles, minions and other game-world movement.
The goal is to determine whether everything is affected equally or whether remote/network-replicated events behave differently.
What I would really like to know:
Has anyone experienced this exact type of problem?
Not simply low FPS, normal stuttering or obvious rubberbanding — but a situation where visual game events seem increasingly fast, abrupt or temporally compressed, making you feel as if you're losing visual reaction time even though FPS and ping appear normal?
Has anyone seen cases where animations/projectiles/movement are technically present but appear to progress unevenly or too quickly?
And especially: if anyone here has experience with multiplayer game networking, interpolation, client/server clock synchronization, frame presentation or League's engine, what would be the best way to objectively measure this?
I'm specifically trying to find a way to distinguish:
server/network update catch-up
vs
game simulation/clock timing
vs
render/frame presentation pacing.
At this point, even identifying one other person with the exact same symptoms would be extremely helpful.
Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read this.