How To Fix Stuttering (Low FPS) on Apple Devices – Stim

AWDL almost always causes major recurring stuttering for Apple iPads & Macbooks when using 5Ghz Wifi if their router is not set to channel 149 (which is very common).

This is because Apple switches your devices Wifi channel every 100 milliseconds to channel 149 to look for other Apple devices and then back to whatever channel your 5Ghz routers is using. This causes what is known as a micro-stutter every 100 milliseconds or so. This will appear as a frame drop and or stutter. It almost feels like a 10FPS stream instead of what should be 120+FPS.

What is AWDL?

Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) is a protocol which is used for many Apple services and features such as AirDrop, AirPlay, GameKit, Sidecar, and Handoff.

How Can You Fix It?

If you can, change Your Router to Channel 149 for 5Ghz. This will cause your device to not have to switch between channels to look for Apple Devices. It can remain on the same 5Ghz Wifi channel to both look for other Apple devices, and access the internet at the same time.
If you can’t switch your Wifi routers channel, the only other option until Apple fixes this issue is to disable AWDL (temporarily) on your Apple Device. This can be done two different ways:
1. Disabling all 3 services which use it (Location Services, Airdrop, and Handoff) in iOS or MacOS settings. Please Note: Apple is constantly adding new services which use AWDL.
2. You can also disable AWDL by running the following command in a terminal if on MacOS:
  1. sudo ifconfig awdl0 down
    1. Note: You will need to do this each time you restart your device
  2. To enable AWDL again run: sudo ifconfig awdl0 up in terminal.

Currently the only solution we know of from our end is to have a native MacOS / iPad OS app but Stim is not able to do this as a website without a Native app.

We hope Apple will patch the issue for ultra low latency Web Apps, or move to a more general standard instead of trying to create their own protocol (breaking 5Ghz Wifi for ultra-low-latency streaming in the process).

Sources:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254594055?sortBy=best

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/jqv6sy/apple_wireless_direct_link_causes_stutter_on_mac/

https://github.com/moonlight-stream/moonlight-ios/issues/607

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