Re:John Carmack on the Joe Rogan Experience [video]
by ses1984 on Thursday August 29, 2019 @01:18PM
(#20831570)
Wow, I never realized my intuition was off by so much. Speed of light in vacuum is still about 16ms between coasts, which is orders of magnitude worse than I thought. I thought most latency came from routers and switches but a significant portion of delay is indeed speed of light.
Re:John Carmack on the Joe Rogan Experience [video]
by davinic on Thursday August 29, 2019 @12:50PM
(#20831244)
Exactly. And 60fps (which is not that high for many games) gives you 16.67ms per frame. at a 50ms delay you're already 3 frames behind.
That's definitely noticeable for latency-sensitive actions. I recently switched a server from Oregon to New Mexico, and I notice the latency increase with mosh.
Moreover, there's not a lot of timezone difference between the east and west coasts of the US. Going someplace like Europe is more like 180 ms.
I've played games with a ping like that, but a lot of the ping was my wifi. Doubling the latency would not make the game a better experience.
This could work well for certain types of game, those that are a little less latency-sensitive. But in general the latency is still a big issue.
[0]: speed of light in fiber is ~ 100e6 m/s, around 3000 miles between coasts