Lag when playing online

ION08

Hey

Just wondering if somebody could clarify what exactly causes the above issue?

I'm playing need for speed: hot pursuit (8 players max) and recently a lot of the other players have been telling me i'm lagging / glitching and complaining that my car is jumping all over the road and keeps dissapearing and reappearing.

I've an Imagine WiMax 2meg connection

The hub is downstairs and my xbox is upstairs (xbox slim, connected through wireless)

Heres the result of a speed test i just did:

Shammy

Your ping is too high , to that sever that you did the test to you are 106 mili-seconds behind .

ION08

What is a good ping rate and any idea how to improve it?

TheMooseInNam

There's a lot to it but here's the basics:

Lag is caused when the info being sent to the game server is either interrupted, for some reason the information was sent too late or someone has a very high ping to the server.

Your ping time is how long it takes for information to hit a designated server and come back again. This is also called latency. So, if you have a ping time of 100ms and I have a ping time of 30ms, I will always have a 70ms advantage over you.

The further you are from the server, the longer your ping time will be. So playing against Americans or on an American server can cause extreme lag because you'll probably have 200-300ms of a delay.

What also effects the "lag" in a game is how consistent your connection is. If you suffer from packets of data getting lost, this will effect the quality of your game connection. Testing your jitter too will give you an indication as to how consistent your connection is too. You can test both of these at www.pingtest.net

Other things that will effect your connection are things like programs sucking up your bandwidth. If you have torrents being uploaded or downloaded on your home network. Also, if someone else is using your home network on another PC. Very noticeable if they are on the likes of YouTube.

Hardcore gamers will always make sure nobody else is using their network while gaming and will switch off and shut down anything that may potentially use the internet while gaming.

Your ping time is quite high for gaming at 100ms. Ideally, you want it below 60ms, preferably 30ms or less.

Here's mine, for example. I would say mine is a decent connection but not amazing. You'll have some boardies with as low as 9/10ms pings and 1/2ms jitter... lucky gits...

TheMooseInNam

There's little you can do to improve your ping times. The actual method used to send information while gaming is different that what you laptop or pc uses when surfing the net. It doesn't require authentication that the information is actually received so it's actually a quicker method of sending data between to consoles. It's also used in Skype and other voice applications to ensure speed over data integrity.

Call your ISP and see if there's anything they can do from their side.

Shammy

ION08 wrote: »

What is a good ping rate and any idea how to improve it?

I think Moose covered most of it , did you do a test with the ethernet cable plugged in ? It might be lower than with wireless (not that it would be that great a difference)