As promised, my ultimate super-secret guide to optimize your hitreg. JK, but there are some things you can do to improve the mess that is Battlefield netcode.
Disclaimer first: The steps in this guide will most certainly improve your hitreg but the extent of the results will vary for each person. Ultimately, you’ll have to face the fact that BF3 has extremely shitty netcode and there is only so much you can do. Don’t let this get your hopes down, it’s just a reminder before I get trashed in the comments.
THE BASICS
1. Static stuff (All)
The first thing you’ll want to do is give your device a static IP address and static DNS servers. To avoid unnecessary work on my part, here are the required steps for each platform: PC, PS3, Xbox 360
How to determine your new IP: Go to a PC and right click on the network symbol in the statusbar, click “Open Network and Sharing center” and then “Change adapter settings”. Right click on the active connection, click “Status” and then “Details”.
Write down the IPv4 address and the Default Gateway. Your IPv4 address will most likely be something like “192.168.1.123”, change the last three digits to whatever you like, as long as it’s between 2 and 254. Ideally you’ll want to use something close to this one to make sure it’s in the DHCP.aspx) range of your router.
For the DNS servers I recommend you use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. These are the public DNS servers from Google and I find them to be very reliable. While this should not make a huge difference, it may prevent crappy ISP DNS servers from fucking stuff up.
2. Port forwarding (All)
Same thing as the previous step: it would take ages to write a tutorial for every router. Instead, I recommend you use Portforward.com to find your router and follow their tutorial for your specific router. When you’re in, check back here.
Disable UPnP in your router, for my Asus router it’s in the WAN tab but you might have to search a bit. It should be listed somewhere. UPnP does the same thing as this but not as efficiently and it might interfere with port forwarding.
Here are the ports for each platform:
PC:
TCP: 80, 443, 9988, 20000-20100, 22990, 17502, 42127
UDP: 3659, 14000-14016, 22990-23006, 25200-25300
PS3:
TCP: 80, 443, 9988, 10000-10100, 17502, 42127
UDP: 3659, 14000-14016
Xbox 360:
TCP: 53, 88, 3074, 80
UDP: 53, 88, 3074
If port forwarding doesn’t work for whatever reason, your router might have a DMZ option. DMZ is a shotgun-approach, it stands for Demilitarized Zone and what it does is it places your device outside of the firewall, leaving it completely vulnerable. This doesn’t pose that big of a threat for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 but I would not recommend doing this on PC. Your choice.
An extra word of warning for certain Asus routers: there is a setting buried deep in the menus called ‘NAT acceleration’. For my AC66U it’s in LAN -> Switch Control. This seems helpful but it interferes with QoS and port forwarding, disable it. It makes wired traffic bypass the CPU to speed things up a bit but it is only useful for speeds above 200MB/s. If you use wireless (WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?) then you’re fine.
3. Network smoothing factor (PC, Xbox 360) The network smoothing factor was a setting added in a patch for BF3. It provides smoother animations at the cost of higher latency. For PC this setting is easily accessible in the options under gameplay, just fiddle around with it and see what works best for you, there is no fixed best value. As a rule of thumb, lower is better but there’s a sweet spot, usually around 20-30%.
This setting is accessible on Xbox 360 as well but it requires you to edit your savefiles. I wrote a guide on this 4 months ago where I explain in detail how to do this. Turn down the graphics a bit while you’re at it. Not sure which settings work but it can’t hurt.
4. Stable framerate (PC) If you don’t run BF3 at a stable framerate you can forget about this entire guide. It doesn’t matter which settings you fiddle with, just get a stable framerate. There is a persistent rumor that playing in 720p gives you better hitreg, whether or not this is true isn’t clear but it does make player models and hitboxes a bit bigger so give it a shot! Video with 720p gameplay here.
THE JUICY STUFF
1. MTU (PS3, PC)
MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit, it determines the maximum packet size your computer or PS3 can send. You’re going to need a PC to determine the best value and if PC is the platform you’re playing on, you’ll need to download TCP Optimizer as well.
Open a command prompt on your PC (windows key + R -> CMD) and type ‘ping –l 1492 -f 8.8.8.8’. The output should look something like this. Keep lowering the 1492 until you get the best response time. At first you can use rather large increments of, say, 100. As you get closer to the best value, use smaller increments. The process should look something like this but don’t expect similar results, my internet is a bit overpowered at times. The best values are usually around 300-400.
For PS3: use the same tutorial as the one you used for the static stuff and change MTU from auto to manual, enter the value you just found.
For PC: If you want to tweak your TCP settings beyond this, just write it down and save it for later. If you don’t want to tweak more stuff, open TCP Optimizer as Administrator, tick ‘Custom’ in the lower left corner and enter the MTU value in the textbox on the right.
Word of warning: Low MTU sizes may affect your up- and download speeds so if you notice a significant drop outside of BF3 it may be wise to disable this setting when not playing. Sorry Xbox people, Xbox Live requires an MTU value between 1364 and 1500 so this setting is useless to us.
2. TCP Optimizer (PC)
TCP optimizer is a tool to, you guessed it, optimize your TCP traffic. BF3 primarily depends on UDP traffic but there’s no harm in fixing a few of the suboptimal default TCP settings. If you notice a negative effect, simply revert them back to the default settings.
Here are two pictures of recommended settings: 1, 2.
This is not a one-size-fits-all thing, just fiddle around with it a bit and observe any changes.
3. QoS (All)
Not every router has this option but for those who do this setting might be useful if you don’t have the best internet and have a lot of devices competing for bandwith. Especially for those with technically illiterate family members hogging the internet with their videostreaming this setting is a godsend. Note that I mentioned technically illiterate because if they are not they might figure something’s up and in my humble experience there’s no better way to start a family fight than fucking with people’s internet. Sorry dad. QoS stands for Quality of Service and it allows you to prioritize certain devices or types of network traffic over others. Google how to set up QoS on your router if you don’t understand the settings.
The settings you’ll need to set up are your device’s IP address and the min/max up-/download. It’s tricky to recommend settings but ideally you’ll want to give your device a minimum download of 10-20Mb/s and 4-5Mb/s upload. Battlefield 3 doesn’t use this much but better safe then sorry. Set the traffic type to ‘Any’ if that option is present. Don’t bother with the ports, the IP address will do.
4. Disable ECN Packets (PC)
I forgot what this does exactly but allegedly disabling ECN packets improves reg. It was mentioned in a guide on Symthic, those guys usually know their shit so I’m going to trust them on this one. Open a command prompt as admin and type ‘netsh’, press enter and then type ‘int tcp set global ecncapability=disabled’
5. User.cfg tweaks (PC)
Time to be lazy, here’s an excellent guide from Symthic that was originally written for BF4. Most of it should work for BF3 as well. These tweaks aren’t necessarily hitreg-related but they’ll help you gain frames which in turn improve hitreg.
6. Port forwarding with multiple routers
If you’re running a setup with multiple routers, forward the ports on the router you connect to and place that router in the DMZ on the other router(s).
Other games in the franchise:
Bad company 2:
Bad Company 2 uses server side hitreg which has advantages and drawbacks. Overall I’d say the hitreg in BC2 was worse. Here’s an old guide I found for BC2 performance tweaking. Since the playerbase for consoles is so tiny I didn’t bother researching the ports. If anyone wants them I can look them up.
Here are the ports for PC:
TCP: 80, 18390, 18395 UDP: 10000, 18395
The following steps may apply to BC2:
- Basic.1
- Basic.2
- Basic.4
- Juicy.1
- Juicy.2
- Juicy.3
- Juicy.4
- Juicy.6
Battlefield 4:
BF4 is very similar to BF3 in terms of netcode, DICE LA did an awesome job with the netcode but there’s no harm in trying to improve your end of the deal. This entire guide can be applied to Battlefield 4. The ports are different, they’re listed on this webpage.
Battlefield Hardline:
Same story as BF4, ports are the same as well. Does anyone even play this game?
Submitted by Spectahhh Xbox 720 Release Date 2015
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