Does Download speed or Upload Speed affect gaming?

ImpulsE69

Lifer
Jan 8, 2010
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Speed doesn't so much as latency. More speed is always nice, but for most games it has no real impact if it's the only thing you are doing.

EDit: When I say latency that is ping. It sometimes can be attributed to how far you are from the ISP nodes. Wireless interfaces tend to have more latency.
 

Cappuccino

Diamond Member
Feb 27, 2013
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726
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Speed doesn't so much as latency. More speed is always nice, but for most games it has no real impact if it's the only thing you are doing.

EDit: When I say latency that is ping. It sometimes can be attributed to how far you are from the ISP nodes. Wireless interfaces tend to have more latency.
Ahh thank you :)

Also, what is a good Ping? I'm getting around 25-35 in most of my game right now. Is that good? :hmm:
 

vshah

Lifer
Sep 20, 2003
19,003
24
81
that should be fine for pretty much anything. if you were a super competitive fps player you might want sub 10ms ping.
 

MrA79

Member
Aug 11, 2012
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1
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Realistically is this even possible outside a LAN?

Not reliably, but most 'hyper competitive' play would be in a LAN format anyway if I'm not mistaken.

As others said - speed isn't the most important piece, just make sure you have an adequate amount for gaming+whatever else you're running (i.e digital tv having dedicated mbps etc). Latency is way more important, but unless you're on satellite or some super-rural provider it should be pretty transparent most of the time. Just my $.02
 

PrincessFrosty

Platinum Member
Feb 13, 2008
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www.frostyhacks.blogspot.com
Bandwidth is not the same as latency. However some game engines require a minimum amount of bandwidth to send all the data they need, if they don't have enough then packets need to be dropped, extra work has to be done client side to calculate stuff and generally your experience suffers a lot.

Most games are fine with well below 1Mbit up/down but it does vary from game to game.
 

Red Storm

Lifer
Oct 2, 2005
14,233
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Realistically is this even possible outside a LAN?

Depending on the location of the server it definitely is possible. When we upgraded to Verizon Fios my ping on our east coast Day of Defeat server went from ~20s to ~5.
 

Dankk

Diamond Member
Jul 7, 2008
5,558
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However some game engines require a minimum amount of bandwidth to send all the data they need, if they don't have enough then packets need to be dropped, extra work has to be done client side to calculate stuff and generally your experience suffers a lot.

Pretty much this.

This is why I try not to have any downloads going in the background while playing Battlefield 3. I only have a modest DSL connection and I want to leave the line open so the game can send and receive packets smoothly without anything else hogging my bandwidth.
 
Feb 4, 2009
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I've also seen 10ish in TF2 on rare occasion, same thing with BF2 from years ago. Fios can be real quick/low latency.
 

Gryz

Golden Member
Aug 28, 2010
1,551
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Most important factor to determine the RTT (Round Trip Time = latency = ping) is the Speed of Light. Speed of Light is just too slow.

Speed of Light through vacuum: 300000 km/sec.
Speed of Light through fibre: only 60% of that = 180000 km/sec.
Result: our packets on the Internet fly at 180 km per millisecond.

You wanted a ping of 10 milliseconds ?
Your packets can go a maximum distance of 1800 km.
Taking into account that ping is RoundTripTime (back and forth), it means that for a ping of 10, the server can be only 900 km far away at most.

For the metric-impaired, that's 560 miles.

In reality there's gonna be some congestion delay. This depends on how your ISP(s) have build their networks.
And some transmission delay, but at high speeds, transmission delays don't matter.

Note, different games mean different things when they say "ping".
Some just measure the RTT, and nothing else.
Some include the delay your packet has at the server.
Some even include the delay that can happen on your own PC, because of framerates.
 

akahoovy

Golden Member
May 1, 2011
1,336
1
0
I miss my old DSL connection from 2007-2010. I had 10-25ms ping all the time to Dallas servers for FPS games. I kicked ass, and then it all went to hell. I haven't had reliable latency since then. Maybe some day I will again.
 

Tweak155

Lifer
Sep 23, 2003
11,447
262
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If you're hosting a game then upload matters, otherwise 1mb is fine. And download 3mb is more than enough. This is of course assuming it is your only traffic.