PING

[TNT-BOOM]

What internet speed must I have to play this games-UNREAL TOURNAMENT.UT2003,UT 2004

[TeRRaPIN]

all play well on 512 in my experience :)

[sikamikanico]

you "CAN" play it with a 56k modem or less
but to be good it should be at least "standard adsl" (768/128) nowadays
even if i know isdn guys that own me:D

and the other thing is you need a good provider with good carriers
tell us in wich country you live i am sure someone here can give you a tipp

greets
sika

[Flash]

Modem is too slow. You can have fun but you won't do much winning. You'll ping 200+ on F6. (More if it's a win-modem, they compete with UT for the CPU cycles)

64k isdn is sufficient, but you'll still be at a disadvantage. 128k isdn doesn't make as much difference as you'd think. Ping will be 85+.

512k cable or isdn is great. You won't see much advantage beyond this except by changing provider. Don't be thinking that getting a 4MB connection will improve your game, it won't. Ping will be 40+. Typically 60-80 on f6, some exceptional german providers give pings of 30 to local servers. I've seen F1 pings of <20, and those guys are real hard to hit.

All can be affected adversely by:

Physical location of server. To a uk player on a half-decent ISP (ie, not AOL who I think still route everything through the USA), most northern european servers are playable. Germany has superb links with the UK and pings are generally only a few higher than a uk server. The Scandi countries are ok, but less advantageous. France is ok. Spain/Portugal and Italy all suck, ime.

Non-essential programs on your computer taking cpu/ram/disk usage and bandwidth. Close down the stuff you don't need and make sure you don't have spyware/trojans or other cruft.

A dodgy modem. (Ie, all USB adsl modems suck. They do, honestly. Compare it to a freestanding lan-based modem and you'll see a new world of low latency and reliability.)

Bad routing on your ISP's behalf. Nothing you can do about it other than shift isp's/

Segment overpopulation. Especially on cable if your area is over subscribed your ping and throughput will get worse during peak times. (evenings) and then recover outside of those times. Again, not much you can do.

The Server lagging. Can be due to bad maps (Monsterhunt ones with hundreds of monsters can be crippling), or just overloaded servers or those with not enough bandwidth.


Measure your ping by the F6 gauge, or "netstat" in console. The F1 pings are only one-way and don't even tell half a story. Packetloss is also a major factor, but probably the hardest to play with are bouncing pings and packets of bad lag. Tweaking netspeed can help (2800 for modem, 4500-5500 for isdn, 10,000 for 512k or above) and during times of bad PL or high pings, reducing the netspeed can actually improve your game experience.[/list]

[Catchse]

A slow computer can also effect ping, since a delay can occur. I was using an older computer for a little while when my computer broke and this was a big problem for me.

[FoamyGal]

A bud told me lowerin details and unchecking Dynamic LIght is giving virtually 20 less ping. Due to what Catchse set, I think it may be true :)