Dead by Daylight lag: causes and fixes

In Dead by Daylight, lag has two sides: the killer's hit that connected from what looked like metres away, and the survivor's pallet that dropped on one screen and not the other. Here's how the game's servers work, why both players' connections matter, and what helps.

How Dead by Daylight's matches run

Dead by Daylight's matches run on dedicated servers in Amazon's cloud (Amazon GameLift), not on one player's PC. Every player, killer and survivors, connects to the same server, and the server decides what happened: whether the hit landed, whether the pallet came down first.

Each player sees the match a little behind the server, by their own ping. When the killer and a survivor both have some delay, their two views of a chase disagree, and the server has to pick one outcome. That's the "hit from a metre away", and why it happens more when either side has a bad connection.

So your connection matters for everyone in your match, and theirs for you. You can only fix yours, but that's the part you feel on every loop.

Find which kind of lag you have

• Everything a little late: a high, steady ping. Distance to the server, or a long road your provider takes to Amazon's data centres.
• Fine, then rubberbanding: spikes. Something on the way queues, often your own line or Wi-Fi. What causes ping spikes shows how to find where in ten minutes.
• Actions that don't go through, vaults that snap back: packet loss.
• Stutter in busy moments with calm network figures: your frame rate, not the network.

The game itself tells you little about your connection, so test from outside it, once at a quiet time and once while the lag is there. What causes ping spikes shows how, and where along the way the delay starts.

What helps

1. Use a cable. Wi-Fi's jitter turns into rubberbanding in chases. Wi-Fi or Ethernet explains why.
2. Keep the line quiet: background downloads and uploads make your inputs wait.
3. Fix the router's queue (SQM, or QoS that's configured) on a shared connection.
4. Mind the time of day. Lag every evening and none at night is your provider's busy hours.
5. Change the route when your ping to the servers is higher than distance explains.

Where NoSpike fits

NoSpike's Dead by Daylight entry is a beta: its servers are still being mapped, so NoSpike may not carry all of a match's traffic yet. While you play, its page in the app says what it carries, and on a server NoSpike doesn't route it shows your own ping and says "Match not routed".

Where it does carry the game, it measures your own route and the routes through its relays in Europe, and routes the game only when a relay is faster. It can improve your side of the match; the other players' connections stay theirs.