When I installed a new PCIe network card into my gaming PC I was surprised by suddenly lagging mouse input (via network, it’s a headless machine)…

It turns out the driver for the network card had a setting for throttling interrupts to the CPU, which was enabled by default. This reduces resource usage, but in my case it introduces problems.

The way to disable it is:

  1. Open device manager
  2. Open the Properties window of the network card
  3. Select the “Advanced” tab
  4. Set “Interrupt throttling” to “disabled”
  5. Click “Apply”

To be sure I rebooted the PC, but I immediately noticed a less laggy input when applying the setting.

If this applies to you, maybe your driver has a similar setting which is enabled by default.

The other way around might apply as well. If you notice a noticeable FPS drop in a busy network (and are not streaming your input via network), enabling this might give other parts of the system more breathing room. The driver for the card I use also had a setting for setting the “throttling amount”, but only for arbitrary values like “high”, “medium”, and “low”, instead of allowing me to set a time or a number of incoming packets.

I hope this post was useful. If you have any suggestions or found errors please let me know!