Can multiple instances of COD affect Ping?

[theonlyfool]

I've been digging around in the hopes of finding an answer to this, but nothing I've found so far really applies to my question. Maybe someone here can help.

I'm curious if, while say playing Call Of Duty online, that multiple instances of the game, for example me on a PC and another person on a Xbox 360, playing at the same time, would actually affect the games ping.

I know that ping is usually not affected unless the upload/download bandwidth is saturated, which in turn causes packets to have to wait to be sent or received. But what about the amount of programs trying to send small amounts of packets at the same time? Will this cause an increase in ping, and if so, how much traffic would really be required to cause and notable increase in ping?

Would 1 person playing COD on a PC, and 1 other on a Xbox 360 really conflict? I have someone always blaming his in game ping lag on something I'm doing. And I want some knowledge to back up my belief that 2 people playing at the same time is far from enough to cause any kind of lag.

Thanks.

 

[bill001g]

You are correct in you assumptions on how it works. That is like saying nobody else should use the internet because I am playing a game. You of course will have a packet here and there that has to wait when you have multiple things running but it many times tends to be less than 1 ms and even if it was some large number like 10ms it will make no difference. You would have to massively overload a link to say get 100ms.....and many times you will get packet loss rather than delays on a overload.

Since games use very little bandwidth it is highly unlikely you would ever exceed the download rates but on a connection that has a very low upload rate you might exceed it. Most games are only a couple hundred kbit/sec rates both up and down but there could be games that use more.

You can with the windows resource manager see how much traffic a game is sending and receiving on a particular machine.

What you might see though is that things like voice communication is actually using more than the game so you would have to count that software also.

 

[theonlyfool]

As I thought, I figured since the size of data being transferred for that game was very small, only high bandwidth situations would have an effect on ping. I have a 15Mbit down 0.5Mbit up connection, would take many instances of COD to fill that up. Good to know I wasn't off the ball.

Thanks

 

[bill001g]

Be careful .5m up is not a lot and games use both up and down more down than up though. Even at 100k each you only get 5 and I suspect it could be more than 100k you would have to check.

 

[theonlyfool]

Nah, it only uses about 5KB/s up when running, A can upload at about 50KB/s. Should be fine only using 1/10 of the upload bandwidth.