Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Huge internet lag when hosting multiplayer game

Hi everyone,

Whenever I'm hosting an online game my whole internet connection goes almost fully down. Not only in the game itself but the whole connection. Looks like upload is impacted the most cause I can still hear people talking on the Discord server, however my voice becomes unhearable and Discord shows huge lag whenever I'm trying to speak. Same goes for the webpage loading times etc.
It happenes exactly at the time someone else joins my game. With 2 people it's bearable after waiting a bit, but with 3... unplayable.

I'm playing on the Lenovo Legion 7 laptop with RTX 3070, 16GB of RAM and AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (Windows 11) and my wired internet connection while NOT hosting a game is:
Download - over 700 Mbps (latency 103 according to speedtest)
Upload - around 40 Mbps (latency 5 according to speedtest)
Ping 9ms
But when someone joins, download speed can drop down to 8 Mbps, and upload something below 1 Mbps.

I've tried using WiFi, using hotspot from my phone, no visible improvements.

I'm not sure if this is something wrong with the game or my setup itself, but perhaps someone else had a similar issue and knows the root cause.
Thanks for the help!

EDIT: I forgot to add that all the resources remain on the stable levels (GPU, CPU, Memory, Network usages) and it's totally fine when I'm joining someone else's game.

Hello, so my friend also had the same problem on his lenovo pc, not just when hosting bd3 but also in other games too. After he decided to uninstall all of the lenovo pre-downloaded programs on his pc (legion arena, lenovo vantage, and one other lenovo program) the problem just went away. I'm not very well verse in this but we assumed that at least one of the programs were somehow interfering with the upload. Perhaps this is also the issue for your laptop. Hope it helps.

tldr; just uninstall all the lenovo programs on your laptop.

As it happens exactly when another player joins, look at the network/router side before blaming the laptop hardware. The fact that joining someone else’s game works normally also points in that direction. The upload dropping below 1 Mbps is the biggest clue. I’d check whether the router is struggling with NAT/UPnP or bufferbloat when the game starts sending more traffic. Since you already tried wired, Wi-Fi and a phone hotspot, I’d also test with all VPNs, third-party firewalls and network monitoring software disabled. If the problem still happens through the phone hotspot, that would make a normal router configuration issue less likely and I’d focus more on the game’s hosting/network code or the Windows network stack.