The importance of ping in online gaming

simon22

simon22

simon22

Associate
Joined
30 Nov 2009
Posts
423
Well, this has been probably discussed many times before and at the end of any discussion the conclusion was that the lower the ping the better game experience.

But how exactly do you define better game experience? Obviously those with a lower ping will somehow have a better advantage, but I actually never knew how... All I know is that pretty much the distance is the main factor that distinguishes the ping level. So, if a person lives far away from the hosted game server they will have a higher ping than someone that lives in the same country/city. Okay, so what?

If I live in the UK and I get a ping of around 150-200ms when playing on a US server, what are my disadvantages? Let's say I have a 100Mb connection, I surely should be having a nice and smooth game experience?

So why exactly does distance affect your game experience when you have a good internet connection? Will the internet technology ever change this particular aspect? I know I may sound daft but you always get people worrying about ping and such, and I always wondered how this whole thing works. :)
 
Because ping/latency has very little (some would argue nothing) to do with connection speed. Your 100mb connection will allow you to download 100mb of data within one second. What ping and latency represent is how long it takes for each packet to be sent and received back. Hence why high latency servers appear "laggy" when you play on them.
 
Does everybody get the same deal when it comes to Ping? ie. is it based on distance and all traffic go through the same backbones? Say I'm on one ISP and next door is on another ISP, we connect to the same server, would there be a significant difference? Do any ISPs specialise in low Pings (if thats possible)
 
The easiest way of looking at it imo is that if you have 200ms latency then any action you perform is going to be registered by the server .2 seconds later.

So if you're playing an RPG and you interupt a 1 second cast 0.85 seconds into it, because of your latency it will probably still fire off, whereas someone with 20ms latency would have stopped it.

Edit - there are a ton of things that make this hazy, especially if you have packet loss.
 
Adjusting TcpNoDelay and AckFrequency is a nice ping tweak also and can make a significant impact on ping times.

TcpNoDelay 0 disables Nagling which in short trades efficiency for speed, speed is far more important in gaming and packets should be delivered right now right now, not held to transmit more efficiently.

I would say 100Ms is about the max limit for an FPS if you want to remain competitive. Personally I would rather that be sub 50. I ping on average between 20 and 40 depending on the game to servers in Europe.

100-200 is pretty acceptable for less latency sensitive games (RPG, RTS for example) or where there is no competition of any note (playing Co-Op L4D2 with pals)

Anything above that will have a noticeable impact on game quality.
 
Last edited:
simon22 said:
All I know is that pretty much the distance is the main factor that distinguishes the ping level. So, if a person lives far away from the hosted game server they will have a higher ping than someone that lives in the same country/city. Okay, so what?
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. Distance plays a part but the connection type and routing also matters. So for example someone living in Sweden may actually have a lower ping to servers in London than someone living in the UK, if for example the latter person has an interleaved ADSL connection whereas the former has a fibre connection with good routing.

If I live in the UK and I get a ping of around 150-200ms when playing on a US server, what are my disadvantages? Let's say I have a 100Mb connection, I surely should be having a nice and smooth game experience?
Click to expand...

Bandwidth doesn't matter much for online gaming once you get beyond a certain point; for most games even 256kbit is enough.

So why exactly does distance affect your game experience when you have a good internet connection? Will the internet technology ever change this particular aspect? I know I may sound daft but you always get people worrying about ping and such, and I always wondered how this whole thing works. :)
Click to expand...

Internet technology will never overcome the distance barrier. Even if someone could create a 100% efficient network operating at lightspeed, the fact of the matter is that the speed of light is simply too slow. You'd still be talking over 100ms roundtrip between say London and Sydney.
 
in older games it mattered quite a bit

defintely better on cable than adsl dont care what anyone says :p
10-29 great
30-60 acceptable
60-100 if in europe id ask why

over 100 would not except and move instantly
 
HangTime said:
Internet technology will never overcome the distance barrier. Even if someone could create a 100% efficient network operating at lightspeed, the fact of the matter is that the speed of light is simply too slow. You'd still be talking over 100ms roundtrip between say London and Sydney.
Click to expand...

Never is a bit strong... I reckon quantum entanglement will play a part in future infinite bandwidth zero latency networking :D
 
Online games use prediction algorithms to guess where things will be a bit ahead of real time so ping technically shouldn't interfere as much. Lan gaming im not sure but ping wouldnt matter but i dont think it uses prediction stuff as a online over the net would.

Obviously if u can have a lower ping then great but for me on 30mb soon to be 60mb in july my connection to say star trek online is about 180 ping and using speed tests to California servers i get about 3-5mb connection speed which i didnt think would be that bad tho it is a distance.

Ping wise for say bf3 im about 15-30 ish i dont tend to check connection speed to servers in uk as they should be pretty maxed out my end to them.
 
I used to play Americas Army on 200ms ping and it always seemed fine for me. All depends on the game really. I remember in some games they would make the laggy player harder to hit, however in most of them the laggy player is the one who has their gameplay spoiled.

It's also to do with how many devices your connection to the server hops through.

Also some ISP's are **** for ping and some are better, connection speed has nothing to do with it.

You can have 100MB/s download speed with a 200ms ping which means you'll just get your stream of a download 200ms after and the server will respond to any HTTP responses 200ms later.

The TcpNoDelay tweak only really works for games like WoW which is slower paced as it forces the TCP packet to be sent when it's created instead of waiting to fill it then send it over and WoW sees this as a lower response time, but it doesn't actually change your 'real' ping, just the game's calculated ping.

For FPS games let's say a game uses prediction and the players on the screen move fine and you see an enemy and he sees you and you both start shooting.

With your 200ms ping and the enemy guy with his 20ms ping his bullets will register with the server first and deal you damage until the server receives your command to shoot 180ms after him. Puts you at a disadvantage in those games.

Better technology in gateway routers and better quality internet lines will reduce your ping but the limit in decreasing ping times will be the speed of light.
 
simon22 said:
If I live in the UK and I get a ping of around 150-200ms when playing on a US server, what are my disadvantages? Let's say I have a 100Mb connection, I surely should be having a nice and smooth game experience?

So why exactly does distance affect your game experience when you have a good internet connection? Will the internet technology ever change this particular aspect? I know I may sound daft but you always get people worrying about ping and such, and I always wondered how this whole thing works. :)
Click to expand...

Can't increase the speed of light, if the data already goes over fiber there's not an awful lot you can do about it, perhaps faster switches/hubs, or upgrade older slower lines...

Ping vs Bandwith:
Imagine a motorway, everyone travels at the speed of light, Ping is the time to get from one point to another, bandwith(/speed) is how many lanes it has.

I have cable, pinging google.nl is 5-8 ms, some Dutch game servers I have a ping of +- 10 ms, about 30-50 ms for Belgian, UK or German servers usually. Depends of course how busy it is though.
 
Last edited:
~>Dg<~ said:
in older games it mattered quite a bit

defintely better on cable than adsl dont care what anyone says :p
10-29 great
30-60 acceptable
60-100 if in europe id ask why

over 100 would not except and move instantly
Click to expand...

Agree 100% quake 3 days I went on adsl 40 ping then got cable I had about 18 and it as so much better my rail accuracy increased quiet a bit!
 
I notice a massive difference in my ability to play between university and not. At university, my ping to UK servers was a stable 4-5ms, at home it is 10x that (thank you Tiscali.....). In modern FPS games, a high ping will mean that despite you apparently shooting, in reality you were dead before you hit the trigger as the enemy pulled theirs a long time before you.
 
I don't thing online gaming was ever part of the TCPIP draft.

It was just an efficient self-routing packet protocol designed around different interconnecting networks.

Ping will vary, depending on what route the packets decide to take to its destination. If me and my next door neighbour, using the same ISP connected to the same server. Both our packets might go via totally different routes, resulting in different ping times.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom