Quake, Frames Per Second, and Ping!

[Mindf!3ldzX]

There has been much debate about how ping is a negligible number since most everyone has went broadband,and now a narrowband player is unheard of. The only differences would be ISP's, route's & location , and obviously, the ping times.

Some swear that 50ms is negligible and a 20ping vs a 70ping,has no real difference and its all related to skills. Some would even go as far as to prove that they can beat you with their normal ping,then ping up.But I think thats a bunch of balony!~ The higher the delay,the completely different the playing style needed. If you ping 100 (thats me @ westside

There is also a direct link between pings and frames per second, and sensitivity settings also seem to "mysteriously" be affected going from,say , 150fps to 500fps.
at 500, the same sensitivity that was adequate at 150 is not sufficiently fast enough at the higher, 500 fps.

server side TICRATE, this obviously effects ping's. This is a mysterious "Gear" or "Cog" in quake servers, that realistically I only played with and never understood this,other than I could make the server seriously fast or stupid slow with it.

anyone want to enlighten me about all of these factors ,and what translates to a good game in various servers,or atleast explain some things and their influence on gameplay.

[Disco]

Well in my opinion the ping ranges are grouped like this:


0-30 = Lan ping
31-60 = Low ping
61-90 = medium
91 + = high

For me there is noticeable differences between all 4 of these. I cant go from playing at CRMOD 40-50 ping to CLANHDZ 10-15 ping and not suffer for a game or 2 because of the differences. IE, shoot the walls, lg gun too fast, etc.

[MH]

Well that's all bollocks. For something like Quake latency is far more important than bandwidth, and it's possible to have very very good bandwidth but bad latency. Ping is still important because it specifically measures latency, so don't ignore it.

[metchsteekle]

120-130 ping is nothing if it says in that range, but my pings always jumping around, breeuregehgrhgf.

[oldendirt]

Consider what's running on the PC. Windoze updates, antivirus, or Outlook Express polling for email -- other processes may periodically grab CPU and slow things down occasionally. If Quake is using a large slice of local resources (whether because of an old PC, or if one is running Darkplace in 2560x1080 with hi rez textures), that may exacerbate the problem.

Consider bandwidth too. Assuming, say, 100 Kbps as the normal throughput for netquake (a reasonable estimate I think), a user with a 4 Mbps uplink has plenty of overhead for other stuff the OS pulls from the network in the background, whereas someone with only a 128 Kbps uplink may experience widely varying ping rates.

Also you never can tell just what's going on inside that big black box they call the Interwebs. I read recently how a university doing some experiments with a routing protocol (BGP) prevented access to a bunch of TLDs for a while.

[R00k]

For me if I use vid_vsync 1 at 75hz I get about 25ms ping on RAGE. If I vsync off and use cl_maxfps 208 my ping drops to about 17ms. The client-side polling of the mouse is related to cl_maxfps by Host_FilterTime. Though the baseline response by the server is associated by the sys_ticrate of the server, which is actually just a cpu throttle on the server-side. I think higher fps would just spam the server with messages from the client, updating the "sent packet time", and when the server responds back it timestamps that packet, and the client calcs the ping from then. So, it seems to be more cosmetic to see lower pings associated with fps but, on the client side of course higher fps will have more responsiveness both visually and input wise. (gosh that was a rant does any of this make sense?)

[Phenom]

For me if I use vid_vsync 1 at 75hz I get about 25ms ping on RAGE. If I vsync off and use cl_maxfps 208 my ping drops to about 17ms. The client-side polling of the mouse is related to cl_maxfps by Host_FilterTime. Though the baseline response by the server is associated by the sys_ticrate of the server, which is actually just a cpu throttle on the server-side. I think higher fps would just spam the server with messages from the client, updating the "sent packet time", and when the server responds back it timestamps that packet, and the client calcs the ping from then. So, it seems to be more cosmetic to see lower pings associated with fps but, on the client side of course higher fps will have more responsiveness both visually and input wise. (gosh that was a rant does any of this make sense?)

I think R00k just discovered anti-gravity and free zero-point-energy

[R00k]

No, that would require spinning two magnets repelling against each other with a copper spindle in a vacuum
Oh shit i just gave away the secret to the flux-capacitor!

[Mindf!3ldzX]

My brain almost exploded.lol

[ninjamonkeyz]

my ping drops lower when i increase fps, pq_maxfps 600 is what i normally play with. If i set it to 300 my ping goes up.. fps 300 = 50ms ping
fps 600 = 30ms ping
its weird.

[metchsteekle]

no, that would require spinning two magnets repelling against each other with a copper spindle in a vacuum
oh shit i just gave away the secret to the flux-capacitor!

anymore and we will have to kill you.........