Bandwidth vs. Latency

Posted by Ethan M. on 20 May 2009 | 2 Comments

Tags: bandwidth, latency, ping, speed

There are two factors in online gaming when it comes to your internet connection: bandwidth and latency.  Let’s review on what each of them means:

• Bandwidth – The average rate of successful data transfer through a communications path (usually measured in KB/s or Mb/s – that’s megabits, not megabytes!  See below)
• Latency – The time it takes for data to be passed from the source to a server and back again (usually measured in milliseconds)

Let’s say you’ve got a 10Mb connection through your ISP.  A common mistake is assuming you can download things at 10 megabytes per second.  A 10 megabit connection means you can download things at roughly 1 megabyte per second over the internet.  But even with this fast connection, you still get lag in your online games.  What gives?

Bandwidth is a good thing to have when performing tasks such as large file transfers or streaming video.  The more bandwidth you have, the more data it can shove through your Ethernet cable and the faster you’ll get things transferred.  Unfortunately, optimizing your connection for heavy bandwidth (like the Windows network stack does) actually hinders your latency for things like online gaming.

The most important part of a connection for online games is latency.  We all know what it’s like to put the crosshairs on someone’s head, only to pull the trigger and see them jump 10 feet ahead and you come off with a miss.  This is an effect of high latency.  The Killer NIC® is designed for online gaming, so the primary focus is alleviating this latency problem.  By replacing the throughput-optimized Windows stack with a latency-optimized Linux networking stack, you might see a slight decrease in the transfer rates you’re used to in terms of throughput (and I do mean slight), but you will also see an increase in your gaming performance.  But don’t worry about your downloads; the decrease in speed will usually only be present when transferring very large files over a LAN.  Common internet bandwidth should remain constant.

Bottom Line: The Windows networking stack and a big bandwidth connection will help you for non-gaming applications, but for gaming, the Killer NIC will produce the low latency connection you need to compete.