I hear people bragging about having 1 gbps internet, or 2 or even 5 gbps, and while this does increase download speed like when your downloading WoW, does it make any difference in gameplay? At what point does internet speed cap out in value for gaming? I’m thinking anything past 100 Mbps makes no difference, so long as the internet is only being used by you. I.e no family of 6 all gaming or watching 4k videos at the same time.
Nah, generally that large connection would be used for a family or a small group of ppl . 100mbs solo is too good unless you gonna download ESO and patch it 
2 Likes
Bigger pipes will help you acquire data faster, especially all of that other player data that has to load in busy locations or on full realms, but anything above your pc’s network speed is overkill as far as your personal gameplay goes. I would like to see a lot of that other player data be something you could opt out of.
I am not going to get into the nitty gritty technical bits…
Short answer is no…it depends on the quality of the connection and your PC itself.
I live with 4 other people and we all share a 40-50 Mbps connection and we can all play our games or watch tv or what have you fine. I myself have an average ping on a central server (despite being an east coast person) of 25-35 ms.
A lot of people though make the mistake of poor FPS for “lag”. I’ve got a fairly decent PC and I still only keep graphics at a 6 or 7 because my frames will literally drop by half when set to ultra for literally no discernably difference. Also if you run this game on a HDD instead of a SSD, the agonizing load times is due to your hard drive slow speeds over your internet connection.
2 Likes
Nope, SSD does. The only reason you’d need 1gig or 2gig internet is your downloading huge files for some reason or server hosting for upload speed(as well as good hardware).
1 Like
Not in the slightest, games barely use any bandwidth, like an entirely negligible amount - you could get 20 Mbps and have the same gameplay as someone with fiber.
Higher internet speeds just let you download/upload faster. Same deal if someone maxes out a 20Mbps connection or a 2Gbps connection downloading something, if they hit 100% bandwidth usage you’ll still lag.
1 Like
Ya i am on 100/40 fiber here in Australia and if 5 members of the house use the net at the same time ( that’s like everyday ) I ping 5ms in WoW at all times outside server issues.
You can rarely get WoW to use even 1 Mbps, let alone a gigabit. Performance is based on the aggregate of every client within range, modified by the server’s capability to track coordinate data and run scripts for each. So you really wouldn’t see much benefit from it unless every single player in line of sight also had that kind of bandwidth, and even then, it’s bottlenecked by the server’s response time and further by the limit on resources allocated to that particular shard.
No. The latency is what is important besides.
I’ve got a 1mb connection (I live out in the country and my local provider sucks) but I’ve generally got a steady 20ms ping which means the connection is suitable for online gaming.
Just don’t try and do anything else aside from discord or streaming music simultaneously. It will not work. lol
2 Likes
It does make a difference yes but once you hit gigabit there really isn’t much beyond that. A lot of stuff goes on between the server and your client. So, the better your connection the smoother those communications. It’s more complicated overall but that’s an easy way to think about it.
Most people don’t have really good hardware at home even if they do have a great connection. So they can be limited by that hardware. For instance, if you have a switch that’s 10/100 your fancy Gb connection doesn’t mean much lol. Same if you have a cat5 cable. If you’re going over wifi it won’t be reliable either.
I see a lot of people talking here giving you miss information. Networking is fun but most people don’t get it. I work for an msp and have my ccnp, among other things. If you want to learn more you should check out some books on basic networking.
Not directly. In some places people see an increase in WOW responsiveness as the advent of these options comes hand in hand with upgrades in local internet infrastructure and thus lower latencies along with higher speeds.
Many companies in places I have lived actually simply put in new fiber along side rather in replacement of older copper or other lines. Lower speed packages are left on the old network while higher speed ones exist solely on their new hardware.
See what the local providers will tell you about their average latencies as determined by the package you get. Look online at speed test sites and see what the latencies are actually like for customers and see if faster equals lower latency.
1 Like
Only ping matters for gameing the lower ping the better gameing.
2 Likes
I have a wireless isp with 50 ms ping and 50 mb sadly the data cap is to low for my likeing 
.
These people have the hardware at home allowing for that much intranet bandwidth. They do not have that fast of internet. I don’t know how many people I’ve seen get a 1000Mbps router and tell people they have 1000Mbps internet.
i play just fine on a six megabit connection. wow itself doesn’t use that much bandwidth in the day to day. latency is more important.
1 Like
uh, service providers have been offering multi-gigabit connections for several years now, mainly in larger cities. it’s actually the opposite of what you describe these days. people have a gigabit connection and a gigabit ethernet port on their computer, but use something like a 300 megabit wifi router.
That’s a marketing gimmick. My internet is advertised as 2000Mbps but you never get anywhere near that. You never even reach 1000.
it’s about 50/50. depends on your service provider, and the terms of your contract. i pay for 6 megabits, but i live in a rural area and that’s literally the fastest i can get. and i get that speed, and sometimes a little more.
while my sister lives in the city and she pays for “up to 1 gigabit” download speed. she gets an average of 5-6 hundred megabits through most of the day, but in the evenings it goes down to around 400 and in the early morning it goes up closer to the listed “gigabit”
The point being that you will never get anywhere near what yours is advertised as. People who claim they do are not being honest.
The game itself will mostly use less than a megabyte of data per second. Aim for good ping.