Your upload speed and gaming

[pogoman]

something i've always wondered about, does having a slow upload speed give you lag in online games? i used to have an upload speed of 256kbits/s but i recently changed plans and now my upload speed is 128kbits/s. at the time of the plan swap i had just started playing arma which was a little laggier than PR but i just chopped it up to the shear scale of arma and so its demand on the server box.
however after playing the campaign match today with 64ppl and getting craploads of lag, but then joining the 32 player server and getting no lag, im wondering if my upload speed isnt good enough for those games with large scale battles.

anyone got any insight on how neccessary uploading is for games, like could 128kbps not be enough?

[Uncle_Darth]

short answer is no its not.

If you play with highish setting or are using viop at the same time you will get lag.

Min i would say is 256 and even then it could get stressed on some maps

[ThePhotoshop]

128kbps is sufficient for small scale games like BF2 and TF2. You'll need much larger for games like ArmA or hosting a server. It affects your ping more than your download speed does.

[pogoman]

oh ok thanks alot! i knew it had to be something like that, cause its been bugging me ever since i got arma and i only made the connection when i played PR today (i pretty much got arma and the new connection on the same day :S so though arma was just laggy)

[Shotgun]

if you have large lag spikes or drop outs just reset your server.. works for me every time as a matter of fact i dropped out just before the game tonight

[pogoman]

argh for some reason bigpond cable (dont ask me why we're with them, wasnt my decision) is like limited to 128kbs upload unless i get their stupidly expensive extreme plan which is a max of 256kbs :(
oh cruel world!

[S.O.P]

Ouch, 384 here.

And those lucky ADSL2 folks with 1mb uploads that can host small BF2 servers....

[pogoman]

ok i might have to change to a plan with light usage but 256 upload. can other people with 256kbps upload speeds post how much lag they get in 64player games of PR or arma etc?

[S.O.P]

Best way to do it would be to run some sort of software that measures throughput while playing BF2 and then posting it to see if it's higher than 128, or close to.

[Shady]

I'm with bigpond and i have 256kb upload speed its $70 and i barley lag...
And if i do its just my PC causing it.

[Shotgun]

i got 1500/256 $79.95 monthly 25gb Download
Tesltra

its called
BigPond ADSL Liberty

I also run it about 10m wireless and get next to nothing lag, if i do i reset server and its all good

[Fallen.]

Gaming in aus ...ADAM or IINET or INTERNODE.
they seem to be the isps that do plans for gamers ..ie low ping high quality of service stable.

[pogoman]

well i monitored a few hours of arma online and found my upload speed maxing at about 20KB/s (technically i should only get 128/8=16KB/s) so its def my connection i guess :S . something bizarre too was that my download hit speeds like 300KB/s lol. wierd stuff.

[Wokeye]

I went from a 512k speed (Exetel) to 1500k (Internode) speed plans, and noticed a difference in online gaming, then most recently went from that 1500 speed to Soul ADSL2+ and it did not affect pings etc. It did help a lot with VOIP (telephone, not BF2) though, with the extra upload speeds of ADSL2+.