Videlag in games contagious?

[Grakatt]

When playing RTS's with many people, you know it gets a bit laggy as the bases get bigger and the units and explosions become more numerous. Is it the slowest machine that sets the speed for everyone, or what ?

 

[DaveSimmons]

It depends on how each game (and game server) is coded. I've read developer interviews where they say they've done this, but there is no technical reason why they'd need to -- fragging poor lagged dialup users is an ancient tradition in FPS games.

 

[Grakatt]

Ok, thanks, but I was referring mostly to videolag, i.e computerlag, because as you say, the ones with networktroubles tend to 'warp' around alot in some fps's, and just get disconnected in rts's. If you, say, play Generals on four computers, three P4's w. 512MB RAM, Radeon9700 etc, and one P-3 500 witha geforce2, will it stutter and run as poorly on all machines as on the latter?

 

[Grakatt]

Hmm, this might be seen as a bad bump, but I honestly don't care. I really thought people would be able to answer.

 

[bunker]

Nobody else's hardware is going to cause your machine to slow down. Your machine can't handle the amount of info on the screen + the netcode requred to run it.

 

[Looney]

Netcode? I doubt that would slow down the system, since that's mainly CPU, and not very CPU-intensive at all.

The fact is, more people with more things on the screen, equals more polygons that the computer must generate.

 

[Grakatt]

Yeah netcode probably has next to nothing to do with anything, unless there's a problem somewhere along the line, in which case the player will eventually be dropped. Can we agree then that one persons videolag doesn't affect other players?