I’ve been getting some intermittent lag in my matches despite having four green bars in the lobby for SF4 PC. My download speed is 20 Mbps and upload is 2 Mbps. Curious if the upload speed is enough. I don’t know anything about internet tech and how it works, but <b>I was reading that if you’re downloading info you often have to send a ping back or something (upload) every so often,</b> so if a lot of people are active on the internet (there are three of us here; two on ipad watching netflix/youtube, then me gaming) could the upload speed start to get bottle necked without anyone actually uploading anything?
I have green ping in nearly every match I play, and I never play with orange, only yellow when I get it from green at the server select browser. Is it really other people on the network watching netflix? Damn…and GFWL is down so i can’t test whether or not there is a difference while they’re at work.
On a side note how much bullshit is it that I have to deal with fucked up GFWL services when I payed for the game? Can’t play it on my day off because they’re “experiencing issues”…bunch of BS…pay for the game, DRM protection fucks up though so I have to wait, to play, something I payed for. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh
that’s a common misconception but bandwidth is by today standards really not important. what is important on the other hand is the latency of your connection to the opponent, what is also known as the ping (given in milli seconds). under 20ms is awesome, under 100ms good and playable… over that and the lag becomes very noticeable. and that is not a feature which stands for it’s own but always depends on the distance between the players, their connections and providers.
unless you’re <56Kbps, your upload speed does not matter for this game (and most of the problems of being <56Kbps result from PSN or XBL not having sufficient bandwidth to work with)
running netflix, youtube, torrents, etc will mess with your connection if you don’t put a cap on the bandwidth they use (relative to your download and upload speeds.) some isps will start to prioritize traffic (slower for you) if you so much as run netflix or any torrents and won’t stop just because you close them (they will eventually, but it can take up to a full day.) older - as well as cheaper - modems and routers often struggle to handle the amount of connections modern computers make, so try to confirm this isn’t a problem (can be difficult to diagnose.)
ping is almost irrelevant (for SFIV.) many networks (configured properly or otherwise) will reject ping requests, handle repeated pings poorly, or limit the amount of responses. the amount of requests performed and the bars given to rate their response time is pretty meh too, so a lot of connections will display as green but not reveal that they do not have a consistent connection or have a connection that only works as initially rated for a limited time. plus capcom screwed up in a couple of places (searching games will sometimes cache the ping results for no particular reason, in game rating is different from menu rating, rating update frequency in game is pretty slow, green threshold set waaay too high to give the appearance of better online…)
can’t do anything about other people running shit (and you can’t tell most of the time, either.) most people can’t even be assed to learn how to forward ports.