The thrills of a well executed game far outweigh the occasional hitches but all online gamers agree that high latency is the most annoying issue affecting their performance. Latency or ping time, known technically as round trip time or RTT, goes by milliseconds and depends on the connection given by an online game server to its network clients thru a cable modem. Not only are these questionable RTT’s often way longer than what system commands such as ping or tracert return, but gamers also have to deal with more packet loss than what their system utilities show.
When you’re serious about your game, this could be a problem. But it’s fortunately a no brainer. Too high latency and packet loss often have to do with a cable modem having limited network traffic volume capacity, thus stalling network packets or losing them altogether. Sometimes, it’s simply that network clients are getting way too much traffic.
This happens when a game connected through ethernet or USB, for example, automatically configures itelf for a 10Mbps LAN connection which is created to handle heavy network traffic. The cable modem then tends to lag because it is forced to perform beyond its design and capacity. While this doesn’t harm TCP traffic, it does cause packet loss and high ping times for games running on UDP (unreliable datagram protocol).
In this case, you’ll have to skew your game configurations a little so they come easy on your slower-than-normal LAN connection. There are actually websites you can check for game setting variations and step-by-step procedures on how to get the most out of your gaming experience. While some games need you to use the cl_rate or rate commands on your gaming console to turn up your data rate to a max of 6000 – 10000 bytes per second for a cable connection, others require you to go right down to details such as maxpackets and snaps.
If you want to know your system ping time to your game server, you can either use the tracert or the ping command, but you still can’t expect better results even after reconfiguring your game. You can, however, cut your game’s network data rate until your game pings more or less match the figures returned by your system.
Another issue still associated with latency comes with VoIP games. Players all have to speak to each other at the same time, thus creating immense network traffic which even grows with every participant added to the game. The performance of the cable modem is naturally affected as it remains bound to its intended capacity. The good news is, if you’re using a broadband connection, you could actually be playing a game while on a VoIP application as long as you set your VoIP compression to a high ratio.
The inconveniences of online games can be a pain sometimes, but they’re sure to remind us that there’s only more room for things to get better in the world of online gaming.
Author: Kim Poole
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital TV, HDTV, Satellite TV
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