Home Net Connection Speed and Next Gen Gaming Online

[Justin Buser]

IGN have this to say about home internet connections and online console gaming. I have to say I disagree - there is no way that MS would make it say you need a 10mbit or better pipe to play online games at full detail, surely they would have some sort of high level compression software working. As the article states, making a home net connection require a 10mbit connection would basically rule out most homes - I am only 256k here in NZ.

How demanding will the next-gen systems be on an Internet connection though? While the networked media functions and whatnot should work nicely over a fast wireless or 100Mbit wired connection, online gaming and media downloads looks like it may require quite a hefty connection to take full advantage of the systems' abilities.

For instance, many Xbox 360 games will feature support for 64 players online, and many PlayStation 3 games will likely support the same number. Add in full voice support and something like a first-person shooter will already require double the bandwidth of similar 32 player games on current-gen machines. Battlefield 2 for the PC supports 64 players, but you need to be on a very, very fast pipe in order to handle it.

Next-gen games will have a lot more going on that needs to be sent to each player in the game as well. For one, physics systems should be much more advanced than they are in current games, and all of that data will need to be sent to each client. As well, many next-gen games seem to be pushing many, many times more AI characters on-screen simultaneously than current games, so anything with online co-op play will need to send data for each one of those characters. We've heard of games having 2,000 characters/enemies on-screen simultaneously; it would take a massive connection to be able to keep up with that data.

So the question then is whether or not "standard" broadband access will be enough for some of these games. Will a 1.5Mbps DSL connection be good enough, or will gamers need something like a 6Mbps, 10Mbps or even higher to play at the games' most advanced settings? It seems as though college kids may have it best with dedicated optical connections running through their dorms.

[pApA SmerF01]

standard cable/dsl modems will be more than capable of 64 players online. the system they have currently relies on randomly picking the "connection" host to balance the game. i think the next gen will rely on everyone having individual connection host (as in not just one player deciding the "laggability" of the game) and that should solve the problem.

[JAdlon85]

Yes Cable/DSL should be fast enough, and Satellite may work but will be cutting it a little closer as it is the slowest, I recommend Cable because you will have no problems what so ever because it's the fastest, here are the speeds for Cable/DSL/Satellite in case you were wondering:

Cable: 5.0 Mbps
DSL: 1.5 Mbps
Satellite: 500 Kbps

[daniel.isaac.h]

Isn't IGN owned by Sony??? maybe that's why they are spreading this BS.