How much bandwidth does online gaming use?

[Midwayman]

Depends if you have voip in the game, etc.

FWIW if you have LTE service you'll get far better latency.

 

[festa_freak]

I was out of town last year and had to tether my iphone. I reset the data and played a bot game with a bud. It lasted about 30 minutes and I used about 15MB of data. Hope this helps. It really isn't much.

 

[HumblePie]

Wow soo much confusion of terms here.

Think of the internet like a water moving through something.

Speed in Kbps, Mbps, or even Gbps is the actual flow rate of the water.
Bandwidth is the amount that can flow through the river at any given point, which is basically how wide and deep the river is.
Latency is if there are any small damns or gates the water has to wait on.
Caps are if there is a dammed up lake at the end that prevents any more water from flowing except at a trickle after the dam.

So water can move just as fast through a garden hose as it does a river. However, the river is going to have far more "bandwidth" that allows for more data at a time to move compared to a garden hose.

So in reference to the OP's question, most games don't use that much bandwidth. However, the bandwidth usually provided by a cell connection is not usually much. Data that flows through that isn't using the full bandwidth my move quick enough, like loading a web page, but playing most games is going to be more bandwidth than most cellular connections will allow. Which if you start needing more bandwidth than provided you'll get slower on your data transfer, which will up your ping and slow down your transfer rate.

 

[masameiko]

I'm going through this same experience right now. On FFXIV ARR, i use about 180mb over the course of a 9 hour gaming session while also using ventrilo.