Actually an FPS drop would be caused by failure to render models, most likely from a failure of packet interpolation. It's the slowness of the entity rendering that causes the lag (if it's taking longer for your graphics card to render models, then it's going to be harder for you to interpolate packets).

So it kinda sets off this chain reaction. If you're not rendering models quick enough, then you're not able to receive updates quick enough (because the data in the packets that contains player model location information is being choked by the rendering failure) , so that all gets backed up. Since your lerp is white, you're not dropping packets, so it's trying to push everything through at an extremely slow rate.

The reason that your ping is rising is because in each packet of data that is sent and received by the server will also allow the server to measure the time it takes for a packet to be sent, interpolated and then received (which is technically what "pinging" something is, apart from the interpolation is absent if you're pinging from command prompt or something).


What's interesting is that not only have YOUR rates dropped, the servers rate has dropped from 66/s to 20/s. I don't really fully understand how it all works (I'm just a noob), but I haven't seen that before.

Not trying to be offensive, but is your internet shitty? Or your graphics card? Your PC, maybe? I hope you're not running any background processes whilst running CS:S, because if your CPU is being overused then this could be the cause of your FPS drop, and subsequently all the other issues that entail.

I'm basing my assumptions from my dealings with Battlefield : Bad Company 2, a game too high spec for my PC to run, so I would have 999ms ping for the first 2 minutes of every game until all the models had rendered correctly. Also basing it off of my weak knowledge of the way the Source engine works. Just trying to shed some light, that's all