Will it ever be possible for internet to have no lag?

[GrannySmith1]

In online games today especially in shooters, people will complain about lag and blaming lag or the host for deaths.

I'm just curious, will it ever be possible for internet to have no lag? No more complaining in shooters? No ping delay at all? Will that ever be possible?

 

[geofelt]

I think not, unless the host is not too far away.
The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.
If a signal had to travel 9000 miles, that is 48ms delay all by itself. And... you need two of them.
If it is a satellite signal, the satellite is perhaps 22,000 miles up. Even worse.

 

[photonboy]

Yes, sort of.

While zero lag is impossible, they are working on very interesting techniques to compensate. For example, while your playing online the server analyzes the network lag and applies a compensation.

Basically the network tells your computer to do something BEFORE it normally would (such as a creature's response to swinging your sword) and then the network delay makes things work out.

Apparently this type of thing works quite well but it's all a little moot if the network delay due to latencies or a slow server negate any advantage.

I remember trying an online game and I swung my sword, thing sort of paused, then I was DEAD. Lag is one of the main reasons I dislike online MMO's so we'll see how good things get.

ALL the components in the future including your MONITOR/HDTV will need to have reduced latencies for minimal lag.

 

[wacabletech]

Ask a physics teacher about the velocity of propagation on telecommunications mediums mainly copper and glass these days.

 

[photonboy]

http://news.softpedia.com/news/NVIDIA-GeForce-GRID-Play-Console-PC-Games-Without-Owning-One-269778.shtml

There's a latency chart you can click on for all the components involved.

A LOT can be done to improve the current situation:
a) reduced latencies with ALL components in the path (including HDTV)
b) compensation algorithms (I discussed above).

Eventually cloud gaming will work very well but in the near-future, not so much.

 

[GrannySmith1]

Very interesting. I was just curious that maybe in the next 10, 20 maybe 50 years, the gaming world could be a whole lot different than now? No more complaining about lag. Less raging in call of duty lol.

 

[photonboy]

Very interesting. I was just curious that maybe in the next 10, 20 maybe 50 years, the gaming world could be a whole lot different than now? No more complaining about lag. Less raging in call of duty lol.

There will ALWAYS be lag, there's lag even with a console. Cloud Gaming will improve to the point you really won't notice but there's a lot of improvements before that's a common thing.

It will be interesting to see if the next CONSOLES are completely cloud-based or whether they use an upgraded APU (CPU + GPU). If we see another APU it will be x86 and fully backwards compatible to play games LOCALLY.

I think there will be another APU-based console released near 2020, but it will be the LAST one. By the time we'd see one after that (2027?) we should be completely cloud-based except for mobile devices. Not sure about PC gaming in the long run. I think it's good for 10 years but I think the cloud will eventually kill the PC as a gaming device, but then that sort of thing has been said before and proved wrong.

I think upgrading a gaming PC will involve buying an external device that is an APU and Shared RAM (basically a PS4 without the HDD or BD-Drive). We'll plug it into our small, efficient PC which will copy the game files over to the external "gaming brick" to process. We would have no issues about bottlenecks or deciding what motherboard, RAM or CPU. We would just pick one of the "bricks" and use it until we upgrade then SELL the old one.