Obviously ideal for any game is as low as you can get, generally aiming for < 50 for the best experience. There is some leeway depending on genre and if the game has lag compensation or not. Lag compensation is a bit of odd one though in that it still works best for those with the ideal latency to further enhance their game where if you have a high latency it introduces all kinds of game breaking wierdness, especially for the other players.
FPS < 100 +- . Modern FPS games have lag compensation to help, but you are still at a big disadvantage and lag compensation as a technical limitation can only work with "hitscan" weapons (bullet based instant hit weapons vs projectile based). A lot of servers for the PC games kick you if your latency is too high because of the lag compensation wierdness mentioned above, like people getting killed long after they've moved into cover for example.
RTS < 250 +-. More lenient on latency than FPS games, again depending on game. SCII, HoN, LoL, Total War games work fine at this latency. Higher than 250 you will start seeing spikes and big delay in orders issued. Depending on the game you could also be ruining the experience for the other players, peer to peer RTS games tend to lag everyone if someone is lagging. Dedi server RTS games like HoN and LoL, its just bad for you.
MMO < 500 +-. Hotkey MMOs like WoW, Rift, Lord of Rings Online etc. are playable at 300-500ms. For PvP you will need to get that down, but for PvE content you can do pretty well at that ping range. Now for the new breed of MMOs coming out that have more "skill based" combat, the latency requirements are the same as FPS games which pretty much excludes SA from a lot of the up and coming MMOs.
Finally, we need to talk about jitter. Its all well and good that you have a decent average latency, but if you have jitter > 20ms even if intermittent your going to get spikes which makes gaming a lot worse for you than a slightly higher latency average. You want a stable latency with 1-2ms of jitter. Wireless tends to suffer from jitter and occasionally packet loss, sometimes you can get lucky and get an excellent very stable signal but generally an average latency of 50ms with fixed line != an average latency of 50ms with wireless.
There is actually a pretty simple test you can run to determine if your connection is suitable for gaming in terms of latency:
Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd).
Code:
ping www.isgaming.co.za -t
This is basically just a long running ping test. After 60 seconds press CTRL-C to stop it. This is a snippet of what you want to see:
Code:
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=50
Reply from 196.38.180.2: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=50
Note that the reply time is very stable and quite low, indicating that I can game ideally on the IS servers. Now if you see a high reply time or a fluctuating reply time, eg 20ms, 45ms, 30ms, 70ms, 25ms, your gaming is suffering greatly for it.
Originally Posted by Blackhand
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