High “Time Smoothing” Caused by CPU Bottleneck – Not a Network Issue
Hey everyone,
I’ve been struggling with a persistent issue in Battlefield where the “Time Smoothing” (extra interpolation delay) value keeps spiking extremely high — sometimes over 300–500ms, even when my ping is stable (30–40ms) and there’s no packet loss.
At first I thought it was a network issue, but after hours of testing I realized it’s actually CPU-related. Whenever my CPU frame time spikes or my main thread hits 85%, the Time Smoothing value skyrockets, and I start seeing:
Enemies teleporting or “rubber-banding”
Bullets not registering
The orange/red latency icon constantly flashing
Basically, the game engine (Frostbite) seems to delay rendering to “smooth out” the desync between the server updates and my local simulation — which means I’m effectively playing half a second behind real time.
I did some digging and confirmed:
It happens even on a wired gigabit connection
GPU usage stays low while CPU cores max out
Happens only BF6
It looks like the game’s network smoothing buffer is compensating for CPU scheduling delays instead of just network jitter, which creates a massive input-to-visual lag that feels like high latency even when the ping is fine.
Could DICE or EA please look into optimizing main thread scheduling or providing an option to cap or adjust interpolation delay manually?
This issue makes the game feel unresponsive even on strong connections and good hardware.
Specs:
CPU: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11800H @ 2.30GHz (16 CPUs), ~2.3GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU
Connection: wireless
OS: Windows 11,
Average network Ping: 35ms
Would really appreciate if the devs could clarify whether this “extra interpolation time” is purely network-based or if it’s also compensating for CPU frame delays — because it’s becoming a serious issue for many players with modern CPUs.
