Let me clarify: We have a certain amount of latency when streaming games from both local and internet servers. In either case, how do we improve that latency and what limits will we run in to as the technology progresses?

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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    1 year ago

    Interference is a big issue for Wi-Fi as well.

    You may be able to get the latency and the throughput, but if you're dropping packets because of some noise in the air, that's not good for gaming.

    I also used stadia and have a different setup now… neither one worked very well over WiFi despite some pretty high end networking. I'd still get the occasional blip where everything would get super blurry because … 🤷‍♂️

    Part of that I think is the Wi-Fi chipset in my computer misbehaving, but I could never reproduce that in testing, just in practice I'd run into an issue for a few seconds everytime … which doesn't seem like much until you lose a game or you're about to beat some important challenge and then mAlFunCTion.

    • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Yep, I mean, the comment you’re replying to literally contains the phrase, “the biggest issues are interference…” haha

      Likewise, it’s something that’s likely to improve as we tend to move away from the 2.4GHz band.

      Dropping packets is definitely more of a problem for streaming in particular, rather than anything else, because like you said, if you drop packets you’re going to get degraded quality video. If you were gaming locally, it wouldn’t really affect you as much. Online games have extremely good, well designed methods of compensating for dropped packets in a way that streaming will never be able to match.

      • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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        1 year ago

        Yep, I mean, the comment you’re replying to literally contains the phrase, “the biggest issues are interference…” haha

        Oops, yup, read that one wrong.

        Likewise, it’s something that’s likely to improve as we tend to move away from the 2.4GHz band.

        I'm not so sure. We've been on 5GHz for a while … even on there or as recently as WiFi 6 (which I forgot the exact band), there are still lots of problems.

        Dropping packets is definitely more of a problem for streaming in particular, rather than anything else, because like you said, if you drop packets you’re going to get degraded quality video. If you were gaming locally, it wouldn’t really affect you as much. Online games have extremely good, well designed methods of compensating for dropped packets in a way that streaming will never be able to match.

        Yes and no; dropping packets can still really badly impact competitive games. Casual games that use client authoritatively movement there for sure aren't issues with though.