Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : Game Servers : Latency requirements?

[Brian_R]

Can someone give me an outline of the typical latency requirements for a game server? Presumably it varies game-to-game? What are the most stringent gaming applications?

Thanks for any advice.

[RichardPerez]

It is somewhat up to the gaming engines for that particular game. Thats where tweaking comes to find best possible configurations to run that game.

We have countless hours of finding best possible game configurations to host our game servers.

Just use great providers, nlayer, internap, mzima, etc.

Can you specify your issues?

[Brian_R]

Thanks Richard - I'm coming at it from the hosters viewpoint, does a colo with 35ms of round trip delay from a London PoP mean that the total end to end latency (which will then inevitably be much higher than 35ms) will rule out running some/any games from that colo?

WHat if that were 65ms?

[BrianFarrell]

Latency doesn't rule anything out. The lowest latency possible is ideal and is what you should aim for though. You can have a 200-300ms latency in most games and still connect and play just fine, it'll be a bit laggy though.

[layer0]

For an FPS especially, you want low latency, ideally <50ms to end-users, but <100ms is fine, and <200ms is still playable. As you start to get above that is where it can be really slow. I know a lot of game servers are configured to drop users with above 250ms ping.

[Brian_R]

Thanks all, thats very clear.

[ejxt]

Yeah it really depends on what type of game server it is. There are games that are unplayable at >80ms (often 2D games like Tibia, but also counter-strike), and there are games where you can play with 200ms without any problems at all.

[gordonrp]

Under 100ms and I personally can't notice anything in any FPS. 150+ms it's easy to start having issues in "source engine" based games.

Gameserver clients / kids are pretty picky about ping, and always ask for the lowest ping possible e.g. under 50ms. So if you're thinking about starting a business you need to take this seriously. If you're just running something for your own pleasure then I would say 90ms or less on any game is pretty much perfect.

[pora]

depends on the game type, for FPS or sports, low latency is very important. For action games, medium would be OK. For turn based games, even high latency would be fine. So, the best way would be, get a test server and test it with your game.