Sixty-eight milliseconds. That is how long the PS5 version of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves took to put a button press on screen with V-Sync on, measured by latency tester Nigel “Noodalls” Woodall and reported by EventHubs. No opponent, no network, no internet involved. Just the console, the game and the display.
That number matters today because SNK’s port launches digitally on Nintendo Switch 2 on October 22 at $19.99, with rollback netcode and cross-platform online play. A wave of new players is about to jump into ranked, feel something sluggish, and blame their Wi-Fi. Sometimes they will be right. City of the Wolves Switch 2 lag comes in two flavors, though, and the fix for one does nothing for the other.
Lag you can feel in training mode
Input lag is the delay between your thumb and the screen, and it exists offline. Woodall’s numbers for the other consoles, after SNK’s version 1.1.7 patch added a V-Sync toggle:
| Platform | V-Sync on | V-Sync off |
|---|---|---|
| PS5 | 68 ms (4.25 frames) | 51 to 56 ms |
| Xbox Series X | 59 ms (3.69 frames) | 40 to 44 ms |
| Xbox Series S | about the same as Series X | 42 to 46 ms |
Source: EventHubs, June 2025. The tradeoff for turning V-Sync off is screen tearing.
Nobody has measured the Switch 2 build yet, and SNK’s announcement doesn’t state a frame rate or whether the V-Sync option carried over. So check the options menu yourself, then do the simple test: open training mode and practice a combo with tight timing. If it feels heavy there, the problem is local. Put your TV in its game mode, which switches off the picture processing that adds delay on most sets, and try the same combo in handheld to compare. None of this has anything to do with your internet.
Delay frames, rollback, and the Switch 2’s Wi-Fi
Online, the game adds a second layer. Rollback netcode predicts your opponent’s inputs, then rewinds and corrects when the real ones arrive late. A few delay frames are added up front to make those corrections smaller. When it works you never notice. When packets arrive late or out of order, you see the correction: a character snapping into a new position, or a hit you thought you blocked suddenly landing. (Our netcode explainer walks through both models.)
EventHubs tested this during the PC and PlayStation beta, and the figures hold up as a guide. Dakota Hills and Nicholas Taylor found that connections of 100 ms or lower felt very smooth. A Midwest US to Sweden match, about 4,400 miles, ran at 130 to 150 ms with 2 delay frames and 0 to 3 rollback frames and stayed solid. Things got poor only around 250 to 300 ms with 4 or more delay and rollback frames. Their sharpest observation: Wi-Fi players could show four bars and low ping and still stutter, roll back visibly, or teleport.
That is the signature of jitter, not ping. Wireless links deliver packets unevenly, and rollback punishes unevenness more than it punishes a steady delay.
The Switch 2 specifics
According to Nintendo’s spec sheet, the Switch 2 has Wi-Fi 6, and wired LAN is available only in TV mode through the dock’s LAN port. So the handheld players filling the queue tonight are all on wireless by definition. If you play ranked, play docked with a cable. Our wired vs wireless breakdown covers why the difference is bigger than the ping number suggests.
One caveat on the dock. Since launch, some owners have reported the dock’s Ethernet port failing, with the console falling back to Wi-Fi on its own, per Notebookcheck. Before you blame the netcode, open the console’s internet settings and confirm it actually says wired. If the port is flaky, a USB to Ethernet adapter is the usual workaround, and a restart fixes it for some owners.
Wired, game mode on, and your cross-region sets still roll back?
If your ping to distant opponents is higher than the distance explains, your ISP may be taking the long way. On PC, WTFast can try a different path. It does nothing for input lag or for your opponent’s Wi-Fi.
The region setting and the connection filter
The PC launch taught players two things about matchmaking, and both apply to the Switch 2 crowd.
First, region matters more than the bars. In a May 2025 Steam thread, a player in the Eastern Europe region said about 95% of their matches ran over 100 ms against the same handful of people. Switching to another European region helped. A small regional pool means the matchmaker reaches far to find anyone.
Second, the connection filter has a cost. In the same thread, a player who set the filter above 2+ bars waited more than 20 minutes without a match. A stricter filter gives you better connections but fewer of them. With crossplay pulling Switch 2 players into the same pool as PC and PlayStation, launch week is the best chance to tighten it without a dead queue.
Also worth knowing: the netcode readout the game shows (ping, delay frames, rollback frames) won’t always match how a set feels. One Steam player noted steady readings of about 65 ms, 1 delay frame and 1 or 2 rollback frames, yet some matches felt far worse than others. Uneven packet timing on either end doesn’t always show in an average.
What a reroute can touch, and what it can’t
Fighting games, as Infil’s netcode primer puts it, tend to involve direct connections to other players rather than a shared game server. SNK hasn’t published City of the Wolves’ architecture, but if your match is a direct link to your opponent, the path runs from your ISP to theirs. (Our peer-to-peer explainer covers why that changes the math.) Here is the honest split:
- Input lag: local. V-Sync, TV mode and display settings. No network tool touches it.
- Your Wi-Fi jitter: local. A cable fixes it, a reroute doesn’t.
- Your opponent’s Wi-Fi: their problem, and nothing you install fixes it. A tighter connection filter avoids it.
- Raw distance: the EventHubs Sweden to Australia test, about 15,000 km, was “playable” but not good. Physics sets that floor.
- A badly routed path on a long crossplay match: the one case where a GPN can help, by carrying your traffic on a more direct path.
Two practical limits. WTFast is a PC client, so on Switch 2 the only route is router-level acceleration on supported hardware such as the TP-Link Archer GE series. And because fighting game traffic is often direct, check that City of the Wolves is on WTFast’s supported list before you count on it. Test before you pay.
Play the same opponent twice and compare
Note the ping and rollback frames on a long-distance set, then run a rematch through the trial. If nothing moves, your lag was distance, input delay or Wi-Fi, and you know where to spend your effort.
Before your first ranked match
Training mode first: if a combo feels slow there, fix the display side (V-Sync option if present, TV game mode). Then dock and plug in, and confirm the console reports a wired connection. Pick the region closest to you, set the connection filter as tight as the queue allows, and watch the delay and rollback frames rather than the bars. If your sets against nearby players are clean and only the long ones fall apart, that is distance or routing, and now you know which lever is left.