It is estimated that gaming is going to be a $140 billion industry by the end of 2020. The technical specification along with gaming experience for gaming has come a long way from pixelated games on Atari and Nintendo. Today gamer needs a high-tech console or desktop, but also a lightning-fast broadband connection to avoid a laggy gaming experience. Any game that is being played needs to keep latency to a minimum.
Latency must be kept to less than 30ms to be truly effective
– Trupti Vaghela
Having a high latency will kill the gaming experience for its users. While RPG or sandbox games can function at around 50ms, the FPS (first-person shooter) genre is much more demanding. Shooting at a target, especially a moving target, needs a faster connection for realistic playing.
What we have covered
The digital transformation has changed the way we work and live in this world. With many things relying on internet or having significant online components, latency is the main issue that people are facing today. We have covered the main pain points regarding the latency in gaming industry and how you can resole the latency issue by getting better infrastructure in place.
- What is latency
- What is a good latency
- Players demand flexibility and scalability
- Top causes of latency and their solution
- Port speed + Network
- Overloaded Servers
- Traffic Loads
- Distance from the Host Server
- How to tackle latency
- How can you prevent latency in your internet connection?
- Conclusion
With the provided solution, you are definitely going to get a seamless gaming experience and reduce the latency to the lowest.
What is latency?
While the ping is the signal that’s sent from one computer to another on the same network, latency is the time (in milliseconds) that it takes for the ping to return to the computer. So latency is a measurement of the entire round trip of that signal while ping is just one way.
It’s also important to know that latency refers to the quality, but not the speed, of your network connection. Network connection speeds consist of two elements. The first is the bandwidth (or amount of data that can be transferred within a specific period of time); and the second is the latency, which is the time for that given amount of data to travel.
Ping is often used interchangeably with the term “latency.” So when you hear gamer using the terms “low latency” and “high latency,” then those are often synonymous with “low ping” and high ping.” But that’s not entirely correct.
What is a good latency?
So now that we see high latency means a delay in data transmission, what is considered “good” latency when it comes to online games? Typically, anything at 100ms is acceptable for gaming. However, the 30ms range is considered optimal. So simply put, low latency is good for online gamers while high latency is bad for gaming.
In this article, I will address how latency affects your gaming experience and the steps you can take to be sure that your games provide the ultimate environment for optimal playing.
Players demand flexibility and scalability
To avoid overburdened, many gamers use a dedicated server. As the requirements to power, a server continues to grow, it can be more efficient to move to Cloud rather to continuously upgrade gaming equipment native to all Cloud, which is the elasticity that it provides.
When server admins are using high-performance game servers for their own use or to try to monetize the experience for the public, there are a few elements that will help admins improve the gaming experience. Cutting latency is at the top of the list. Scalability comes in at a close second. Gamers love to play with others so the ability to grow resources and bandwidth is a must-have. For example, Minecraft has more than 10 million players spread across a wide range of platforms, including private dedicated servers and Cloud Servers.
Learn: How to setup your private Minecraft server
Players and customers are always looking for a higher-performance server with high bandwidth, port speed, and low ping time and ample resources to adequately meet the multi-player game requirements. Latency is barely noticed when loading a web page or sending an email, this barely perceptible timing. This is why a lot of hosting providers can actually call themselves high performance, but they will only continue to serve web-pages and email, without the users knowing that those servers are still on 100MBPS!! By choosing a poor hosting provider will be the difference between a successful mission and an utter failure. To avoid these unfortunate results, it’s important to ensure that you have got a Hosting provider who can ensure high port speed and high bandwidth and doesn’t throttle your bandwidth.
The top causes of latency and their solutions
Malware, bad weather, and even interference could play a role, latency usually results from a lot of factors starting from your ISP, Home network, etc. This article will only cover latency from server point of view.
Port Speed + Network
Here you are looking for at least 1GBPS, preferably even 10GBPS. Experts and gamers agree that high-speed, low-latency network switches really shine when the network is required to support time-sensitive applications such as games. This is why at Geek Crunch Hosting we have implemented 100% High-Performance networks working with 10 GbE infrastructures that are intended to handle demanding workloads, such as voice, video, and high-end storage we have implemented network with FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) – this ensures all time-sensitive application can be serviced. The network backbone of Geek Crunch Hosting can provide speeds 10+ TBPS with over 2000+ ISPs Peered With
Overloaded servers
Servers begin to stutter if they’re overwhelmed with data requests. This is especially true if you are using a shared server or Virtual Private Servers. The server-level throttle can quickly increase the latency of your game. When we talk about server infrastructure – CPU class, SSD Drives, RAID, RAM everything needs to be considered.
To solve this problem and to provide a High-Performance gaming experience our cloud infrastructure is 100% SSD RAID 10 with Only E5 CPU class and DDR4 RAM’s. Our Cloud Compute is easily customizable and we can design the exact infrastructure needed to fit your workload.
Traffic loads
Most of the Hosting provider will over commit networking backplane on overall switch performance. A simple example, 20 full-duplex Ethernet ports running at 100 Mbps would require 4 Gbps of bandwidth on the switch’s backplane. If the backplane only has 2 Gbps of bandwidth, you would only be able to run at 50% utilization before the switch starts dropping frames. Other providers often get away with over committing their switches, because networks rarely run at 100%. Therefore, switch performance “looks good” under light traffic loads, but it’s a factor that should weigh heavily on any high-performance switch acquisition.
We never overload our switches and have ample of a burstable backplane (10+ TBPS) to ensure that we can deliver the experience that every gamer is looking for.
Read More: GCH Data Centers
Distance from the host server
If you’re playing a time-sensitive game like First Shooter located on a server halfway around the globe, odds are there will be a greater time delay. This occurs because data needs to travel a greater distance between machines. Geek Crunch Hosting offers 90+ global Points-of-Presence with Data Centers in 28+ in Metros. By putting your gaming server closer to your players, you can solve distance-caused latency problems.
How to tackle latency
Unfortunately, we will never completely eliminate latency we can always try to get the latency to as low as possible. Data cannot travel faster than the speed of light. The best hosting solution can only cut latency to a certain extent. With careful planning and by choosing a great web host, you can cut latency to an amount that won’t limit your player’s gaming experience. The latency of 30 milliseconds or less shouldn’t have a significant impact on any game, even quick draw first-person shooter titles.
You can check if your gaming experience is affected by latency with ping tests. You can see how long a test packet takes to complete a round-trip journey to the server. Also bear in mind that a sluggish internet connection will throttle any gaming experience. While this is out of the reach of game hosts, game developers should publicize minimum connection speeds to prevent customer criticism.
How can you prevent latency in your internet connection?
Here are a few ways you can avoid the frustration of latency and enjoy online gaming and your internet connection to the fullest:
- A good ISP
- Use a wired connection.
- Have plenty of bandwidth.
Better Gaming Today
There are many variables that have an impact on latency and affects the overall gaming experience. Seamless gaming experience is only possible when you have high performance server with the lowest latency. Geek Crunch Hosting brings the stability you need to have an unbeatable gaming experience. If you have any specific requirement for gaming server, get in touch with our experts today to get customized solution for your gaming.
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