Heavy Gamer?

Woden

Hi i'm wondering how much gaming eats into your cap if you are a heavy gamer?

zoro

hmmm, well i've been playing a good deal of games since i got IOLBB on the 1st of December. (Unreal Tournament / Unreal Tournament 2003 / Raven Shield / Star Trek Elite force 2 / web games / cant remember them all now)

Add to that downloading hundreds of megs of updates / patches / maps (at least a gig if not more in total)

Plus my own browsing, plus browsing by my family - plus my sister's fascination with that ****ing westlife fan site and it's ****ing flash ****ing **** ****ing arse stuff and music from it plus the HUGE images that are posted on the boards there

In total it comes to about 3.02 Gigs - note that alot of that is the games updates / patches and stuff so it prob wont happen a second time, unless i get loads more games

That help you any?

Daniel

Gummy Panda

I played Xbox LIVE alot and it eats only a tiny bit into my cap. Someone posted up a link to a website that was saying how much online gaming eats into your cap. I think an hour of Xbox LIVE is less then 50 megs and an hour of CS is less then 100 megs.

Mutant_Fruit

heres some "scientific" answers.

Currently most games work on 56k well enough, so they can't use more than about 3.8k down and 2.8up. Lets assume that they have better settings for broadband users, and so they use up 6k down and 3.5k up per second.


For Eircom (4 gig DOWNLOAD cap)
That works out as 21 megs an hour down= 190 hours of gaming until your eircom cap is completely wasted (assuming you only game with it) which is 8 days of non-stop gaming.

If you have IOL, its a TRANSFER cap, so uploads are taken into account, so thats 34megs of transfer an hour= 235 hours of non-stop gaming=9.8 days of gaming.

As you can see, gaming is quite light at the moment. Newer games will use more and more bandwidth, but i wouldn;t bat an eyelid. We'll all be on 50mbps lines before gaming will eat up 4 gigs of data on us.

However, updates etc will eat up your cap. Also those horrible flash thingies!

EDIT: i stupidly wrote weeks instead of days. :-\

zoro

Originally posted by Mutant_Fruit
However, updates etc will eat up your cap. Also those horrible flash thingies!

yeah yesterday alone i downloaded the Unreal 2 XMP update (270 megs i think) as i've jsut bought the game .. kick ass too

but damn it i'm sick of telling her to turn off the ****ing speakers on that site. how on EARTH can someone design a site like that? i hate it with a vengeance, i hate it's colours, i hate it's music, i hate it!!!


Daniel

Woden

thanks for the info folks my main reason for asking is due to the fact that i've got FFXI and i've just signed up for eircom bb, so i don't think FF will be heavy on the gaming as its not exactly a fast paced rapildy moving game and i'm happy that my upload won't be taken into account.

i also plan to play c and c generals a bit but i should be fine. i do download some things but mainly mp3's not movies or anything.

cheers

data

zAbbo

When playing quake3, a average around 80mb per hour of game.

4gb : and i`ve done that easy coupled with the odd download / browsing

Mutant_Fruit

When playing quake3, a average around 80mb per hour of game.

OMG! So Quake3, a relatively OLD game uses up over SIX times the bandwidth Counter-strike uses? Something is wrong there. 80 megs an hour equates to an average of 22kb's. Thats not right, not for ANY game out now.

EDIT: especially considaring these are the min requirements for online play:

Multiplayer Requirements:
Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP and IPX) play supported
Internet play requires a 100% Windows 95/98/ME/2000/NT 4.0-compatible 28.8 Kbps (or faster) modem

yes, a 28.8 kbps modem!!

zAbbo

6k down and 3.5k up per second.

cl_maxpackets 100
rate 10000
snaps 40

u dig

heh sorry made a mistake there, its around 30mb an hour(consulting logs here)

Its closer to 10kb/s and relies more on upload than download afaik

Praetorian

My brothers generally use between 1.5-2 gigs per month playing games / and browsing. I'm not capped though so it doesn't really matter.

Mutant_Fruit

thats definately a more realistic figure, i was getting a bit worried for a minute. 30mb an hour wouldn't be achievable on 28.8k (i know) but obvious;y you are using settings more tuned for broadband.

Woden

ah well i suppose its amazing how much an ipod can make up for a lower cap in my eyes . really though as you've probably seen my comments in other trends esat was proving problematic for me so i just bit the bullet and went for eircom

Giblet

You could easily have settings tuned to recieve 40k/sec and have loads of people on the server.
(server allowing)

Or have it set to 5k/sec and hope the netcode is decent.

This is why games like Counterstrike work so well on modem, the connection doesn't matter as much as Quake 3, because of better netcode.

It depends.

Mutant_Fruit

You probably could set it to be able to recieve 40k a second, i know i can set Counter-strike to recieve 1 meg a second, but theres no point.

No server will spit out 40k at any one person, and no game (available at the moment) would be able to take advantage of that. If anyone started maxing out their upload speed/download speed in a game, they;d see their pings scyrocket through the roof. I guarentee you that if you set up a server that'd ship 40k a second, you'd lag badly. (assuming you're on 512/128)

zAbbo

sv_fps 40 ? right

sv_fps 100 ?

Eircom dont charge you for going over the limit anyway, i have been using it fairly head now for a few weeks as im going home for a few weeks.

melachi

I'm a heavy gamer I guess. I play different fps games.
I also download patches and so on, and the odd 200-600 mb files.
I do about 5-8 gb.

Woden

so no ones ever been charge for going a gig or 2 over the cap?

OfflerCrocGod

It seems as if they dont mind you going over the cap as long as its not too far over.

Mutant_Fruit

so no ones ever been charge for going a gig or 2 over the cap?

no one has been charged YET. but if people start making a habit of it, they may crack down.