fps online

[fraps]

Hi

Can the server and/or the latency (ping), etc effect the fps you get when playing online?

As I noted my fps (using fraps) fall on occasions playing ut3 yesterday.

Basically what I am trying to say is: are there other things other than the computer hardware spec which can effect fps when playing online?

 

[Zogger]

I would say it's probably possible - depending on the game. It seems unlikely in UT3 but iirc in Prey (and probably any doom3 engine game?) the framerate would suffer when the network started to lag. I'm guessing something about the way it was coded meant that it was waiting for more information before drawing the frame. May be completely wrong though.

In ut3 I would expect your framerate drops to be due to general graphics performance, or possibly cpu. I have played with a ping of over 500 and my framerate has been fine (obviously the game is completely unplayable but that's because my weapons fire half a second too late ). Certain maps always give me worse framerate (i.e. deck, diesel) than others.

Also check there's nothing running in the background that could be using the cpu.

I'm more impressed that you're using yourself to measure framerate.

 

[Yeggstry]

Yes it can. For instance I've played TF2 on a mediocre US server and I've noticed lag spikes quite often. Which is why I now filter only on European servers.

 

[HangTime]

Generally speaking, no. In the majority of modern games, rendering and networking run asyncronously - i.e. even if you have a 300ms ping and 30pl, you could still be running at 100fps. The only exception I can think of is Serious Sam co-op which sometimes used to slow all the way down to <15fps for no apparent reason when there was a lot of combat going on (same area in singleplayer would be giving maybe 50fps). I think it must have been caused by the client waiting for a server frame before rendering.

Do note however, that the converse will often happen - i.e. a low framerate can affect your latency, if your client is rendering frames so infrequently that it isn't sending packets to the server frequently. For example with 20fps it is unlikely that you will ping under 50ms in many games.

 

[fraps]

I would say it's probably possible - depending on the game. It seems unlikely in UT3 but iirc in Prey (and probably any doom3 engine game?) the framerate would suffer when the network started to lag. I'm guessing something about the way it was coded meant that it was waiting for more information before drawing the frame. May be completely wrong though.

In ut3 I would expect your framerate drops to be due to general graphics performance, or possibly cpu. I have played with a ping of over 500 and my framerate has been fine (obviously the game is completely unplayable but that's because my weapons fire half a second too late ). Certain maps always give me worse framerate (i.e. deck, diesel) than others.

Also check there's nothing running in the background that could be using the cpu.

I'm more impressed that you're using yourself to measure framerate.

lol, I chose fraps as my name because it is that damn utility which has contributed to me upgrading - first my whole pc, then x800xl to 7900gs to 7900gto

 

[dbmzk1]

Technically I guess you could say it can. But in reality it doesn't. Apart from a few games as HangTime said, any drop in FPS you get is due to the fact that their is nothing new to render, rather than latency actually causing a performance problem.