Typical download / upload when gaming

[YeOldeTDUMan]

Hi guys,

 

a mate of mine has asked me this question and I didn't know the answer so I thought I'd try the fountain of knowledge and they were unavailable so I thought I'd ask the forum

 

a mate of mine has a Wii ... and was going to start online gaming and wonders what impact it'll have on his broadband ... he currently has a limit per month and was wondering about upgrading

 

so the question is this ... does anyone know typical data upload/download for gaming? as in bytes/hr or something like that?

[t.]

I have asked a few of my "too geeky for their own good" mates this before and they can't seem to give me a straight answer. In personal experience it seems to vary depending on what you're doing. For example when I'm on tdu charging down roads with 7 other people my download (2MB connection) on the computer is poor, say 40-50k. But if I'm parked at the edge of the road with 1 or 2 other people who aren't doing a great deal I get in the region of 170-200.

 

Take this with a pinch of salt as I'm NO expert.

[Camel]

It does depend how many other people you are playing with and how much data the game needs to send to each one of those people.

 

Say if you were playing a 2 player game and both of you werent doing much, you would use about 1mb/hour.

But for a fast paced 8 player game where there is a lot going on you could be looking at about 30mb/hour.

 

But like i said these are rough estimates and it really depends on what game and how much you are doing in that game.

[Eudemon]

Online gaming will never really interfere with your monthly limit, it's just not enough data going down even if you were playing Counter Strike or GTR/Race on the PC for 24/7 with 30+ players you'd be lucky to even hit 1Gb a month.

 

As for speeds for good online play, the general minimum is about 1MB down though 2Mb+ is always a good idea however for online play it's the upload that's important and a good figure for playing is 512Kb upload with 768-1Mb+ if you are wanting to host. You can find out your true down/upstream by simply downloading a fairly large file and watching what your speed is at then times by 8 to get your download speed and for upload, well upload something and then same again times by 8 to get your upload.

 

IE

 

Downloading at 120-128Kb/s means you have a 1Mb line (1024/8 = 128)

Uploading at 13-16Kb/s means you have a 128Kb/s upstream. (16 * 8 = 128)

 

It won't always round up as clean as that but will usually be within 10% of those figures depending on the time and also from where you are downloading from.

[TimBud]

Good place to check your speeds:

[Camel]

that is only a rough estimate on your connection speed and is strongly affected by anything else you have running on your PC.

 

Here is my dads connection whilst on the xbox and downloading films

 

 

But when im at my place i get around 15ms ping, 22MB download and 2.5MB upload

[YeOldeTDUMan]

thanks guys