Can I improve latency any ?

[dan1331]

A friend brought his PC over to game and said the game was considerably less responsive on my network (keep in mind he is a very competitive person so making the game ANY more difficult would be noticeable to him). I was wondering if there was anything I could do to improve that with settings or buying a new cable modem or router.

Thanks!

 

[wacabletech]

A friend brought his PC over to game and said the game was considerably less responsive on my network (keep in mind he is a very competitive person so making the game ANY more difficult would be noticeable to him). I was wondering if there was anything I could do to improve that with settings or buying a new cable modem or router.

Thanks!

That depends on what the latency was, and why it was that way.
You CANNOT control the route it takes across the internet
You CAN customize the security of your router, or clean up your cables in your home, change wireless channels, etc..
All of which are related to the total latency you have on a trip and if yours happens to be bad may help you improve it.

However, that said, I meet people everyday that claim they can tell the difference between 50 and 75 ms, and that's total horse crap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond

If it takes 134 ms for light to travel around the earth, gamers cannot tell the difference in times under under that, no matter how super human they believe themselves to be [last I knew we don't have the bionic eye thing out for random retail yet].

What is more likley causing his "bad" perception is a noise issue either on the wireless or the local house network wires [either cat5 cables or phone/cable lines to/in the house]. More likely intermittent packet loss may be present. Most of the people crying about their latency I run across, ends up being this. [Generally becasue they are on. 2.4 Ghz wireless in an apartment and have no idea how SNR works, nor how to download and use something like inSSIDer from metageeks which maps out your wireless spectrum and can help you choose a channel not already heavily in use if available.]

 

[jerry47]

I would trace route to the different servers involved. Determine where the higher latencies are. Have your friend do the same on his system. There is propagation latency and process latency. Propagation is how long it takes your packet to traverse between nodes. Process latency is how long it takes for your packet to appear on the output of the node, modem, switch, router etc. ,after it arrives at the input . You may find the difference is your provider. Might be informative for you and friend to compare performance with tools at dslreports.com

 

[john-b691]

Trace route is nice but other than seeing what is different between your connection and someone else you accomplish nothing. Even if you were to find a problem in their network no ISP is going to listen to a end user. You call them up and say your peer point in chicago is taking errors between you and ISP xxx. They will go have you rebooted your router... Unless you work in the industry and have internal contacts with the ISP you will get nowhere.

As the previous post suggested the things to check are your wireless, your router, your connection between your house and the ISP. These are the most likely sources of problems and really the only ones you can do anything about. Most other issues you pretty much live with it or get another ISP.

 

[dan1331]

What is more likley causing his "bad" perception is a noise issue either on the wireless or the local house network wires [either cat5 cables or phone/cable lines to/in the house]. More likely intermittent packet loss may be present.

This is all hardwired. I have wireless enabled only for my tablet and the tablet was not in use. In the game there is a ping test and it said I have 0 packet loss. Do you know of a good way to test for noise on my network?

Also, I am starting to think maybe it was bad last night because we were on the same network playing the same game. I am always unhappy with the game's response time but this might have been even worse and I might not have noticed because I was very tired. If this is making it worse is there anything I can do? I am still interested in ways to make my solo gaming experience more responsive. Thanks!

 

[wacabletech]

This is all hardwired. I have wireless enabled only for my tablet and the tablet was not in use. In the game there is a ping test and it said I have 0 packet loss. Do you know of a good way to test for noise on my network?

Also, I am starting to think maybe it was bad last night because we were on the same network playing the same game. I am always unhappy with the game's response time but this might have been even worse and I might not have noticed because I was very tired. If this is making it worse is there anything I can do? I am still interested in ways to make my solo gaming experience more responsive. Thanks!

What ISP do you have [also what subscribed speed?], and what is your usual latency, also is it possible to pick a sever closer to your physical location, some games clue you in on this others do not. 0% packet loss means it was not packet loss then, that's a good thing. If you had an SNR issue with the ISP it would show up as packet loss, so the latency is now in question what is this bad latency rating you get?

Some games can have performance increased by forwarding ports, but this becomes tricky if you have multiple computers running the same app.

Some games just have awful network code designs for modern setups too I remember quake2 used to send packets based on frame rate and you could flood a server in about 1998 with a top of the line network by unchecking vsync in the video options which would render frames whether the monitor refresh rate was ready or not, which enabled yo to soar from like 60 FPS to over 200. At its time or release you were lucky to maintain 30FPS consistently so it was no big deal but as technology got better the design was flawed and servers had to implement FPS limits for their clients, someone developed a new renderer and netcode system for the open engine and that ended the issue if you used it but, all this means there are a lot of variables you need to research to determine what can be done in your house for your set up unfortunately. Is this modern games or older ones or consoles or what? Agree you using any QOS setting on your router for other apps? were you by chance getting those GD windows updates while playing when your friend was over? Several possible issues.......