You’ve probably seen this before during a video call when the video suddenly glitches out and resumes as normal. Jitter can be caused by many factors, but it essentially results in the data being transmitted back and forth at unpredictable rates.
This is another aspect of your internet connection which is less widely understood than connection speeds (or ping for that matter). Not a big deal if you’re playing a relaxed exploration game, but in an MMO, FPS, RTS, MOBA etc, quick reaction times are essential to a chance at victory! Jitter The reason this is vital in gaming is that if your ping is too high, this right away puts you at a disadvantage against the other players in the game, as essentially they can react more quickly than you to what is happening in game. This is the number of milliseconds it takes for a tiny piece of data to get from your device to the remote server and back again.īecause of this, unlike with connection speeds, you want your Ping to be as low as possible. One of the other most crucial things is your “Ping”. (No one needs to get immediately fragged within seconds of the game starting!) Ping (latency)
Download speed for gaming download#
If either upload or download bandwidth reaches capacity then we’re going to have a bad time. We also need to make sure our broadband connection has adequate upload bandwidth to make sure our games can also send data to the game server quickly. If you are on a slow connection what can happen is if another person in your house starts downloading several large files, the available bandwidth can become swamped and be unable to keep up with consistently communicating with your game server, resulting in rubber banding, jittery movement, and likely a loss in the game! Upload speed You ideally want as much download speed as you can get as this is usually going to be the majority of the data transferred during a game.Īnother key reason for this is that the other devices and users in your home will no doubt be downloading files and updates and streaming content while you are playing your game, and if you are using a higher speed connection you have plenty of headroom to allow all these simultaneous uploads and downloads to be happening without impacting each other. This is typically going to be the download speed that is referred to. The “speed” of an internet connection is the first thing many people think about when they think online gaming. You can always use our broadband speedtest to check what these are looking like on your current connection. There are a whole range of things to look at when it comes to the speed of your connection. So let’s look at what you need to think about when it comes to having an awesome online gaming experience. If you have any other people in your home these speed issues are virtually guaranteed to occur very frequently, as they binge watch streaming content, and upload or download files. The reason for this is that even if you’re the only person in your home using the internet, there are likely other devices in the home that are also connected, downloading updates, running cloud backups, and so on.
However a broadband speed this low is very likely to result in a poor gaming experience.
Download speed for gaming Pc#
The absolute minimum internet speed as recommended by Xbox and Playstation is 3Mbps download and between 0.5 and 1Mbps upload, and many PC games recommend a similar minimum.