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MMO: How to improve latency in WoW and LoL in Windows?

Oliver SK.

If you want to know how to improve your latency in WoW in Windows 7 or 8, try a few registry tweaks that optimize your TCP/IP settings in Windows 7 that can reduce your latency in WoW significantly!

Pre-Warnings

Before you start tweaking your system, please read some important notes:

Important: The names of the keys are case sensitive, the correct names are as followed:
  • TcpAckFrequency
  • TCPNoDelay

Also:

We have received a lot of positive feedback from players who reduced their latency from 200+ to 50 or less, however we can’t guarantee that it will work for everyone, so you should simply try it. We haven’t tested it on Windows 8 yet, so if you’re on Windows 8, leave us a comment

WoW Latency Registry Fix for Windows 7

Before attempting to use this registry fix, it is a good to make a backup of your registry first, learn how here

1. Step Open up the registry:

2. Step Uncollapse the following entry:

3. Step Uncollapse all:

You will probably find several “subfolders”. Click through each folder until you find the one with the most entries in the right pane. The right interface will have many entries, e.g. DGCPDefaultGateway, DHCPDomain, DHCPIPAddress, Lease, NameServer, T1, etc.

4. Step Create two “DWORD” registry keys called TcpAckFrequency and TCPNoDelay:

Here’s an example what it should look like:

5. Step Double-click on each new registry key and change the value from “0” to “1” (without the quotes, base hexadecimal)

Now you can enjoy a low latency in World of Warcraft again! This fix worked for a lot of people already, so I’d be surprised if it wouldn’t help you to reduce your latency in Windows 7 and WoW.

How does it improve my latency in WoW?

How it works:
What we just done via a handy registry tweak is to disable the delayed ACK. ACK (short for ACKNOWLEDGE) is a confirmation that you have received a network package. While you are playing WoW, you are constantly sending and receiving network packets and each of those packets has to be confirmed from your PC.
To prevent a network flood of ACK messages (sending out a confirmation for EVERY package) Windows has a smart trick! Windows waits some time (up to 200ms) before it sends out the next ACK, so that it can send out multiple ACK’s in one go. The problem is, WoW won’t send you another network package before it has received the ACK, so your latency will always be higher than 200ms or even up to 300ms.

The solution?

TcpAckFrequency = 1 will disable delayed ACK. Default is 2, so it will wait for 2 packages until sending out ACK.
To disable TCP packet batching, we set TcpNoDelay to 1, so all packets will be send no matter what size they have (normally TCP sends out batched packages).

More information about TCP/IP nagle algorithm