The techniques describe directly forwarding a packet from an ingress packet forwarding engine to a particular destination packet forwarding engine (PFE) when internal packet load balancing may otherwise result in an increased number of fabric hops. For example, a source PFE may receive incoming packets destined for a router reachable only by a particular destination PFE (e.g., egress PFE). Rather than load balancing the incoming packets to a destination PFE that is likely to be a non-egress PFE, a source PFE obtains fabric path information associated with the egress PFE from a destination PFE such that source PFE may forward incoming packets directly to the egress PFE.