Do you know what pain is?
Pain is scheduling a Halo Infinite tournament between you and your friends after work,
only to realize that these same friends that you told to prepare to lose every game are not teleporting when the game starts.
Your internet connection is just rendering the game at 1 FPS.
Your friends say to you, "One thing that I hate is losing at Halo Infinite, why do you like it so much?"
Now that’s pain.
Worry not, here are some tips to get the most out of your experience when cloud gaming.
Hello Everyone, My name is Trisha Hershberger and you are watching DIY in 5,
the show where we break down tech topics into easily digestible bites in 5 minutes or less so that you can DIY your own tech.
Today, we’re discussing how to get the most out of your cloud gaming experience
so you can stay in the game.
If any of the tips in today's video help you out in a bind, give us a like and subscribe
so you don’t miss out on any future DIY tech tips.
Cloud gaming is a revolution.
We can now play high performance video games on devices we already own, virtually anywhere.
This is now possible because the game engine is running on a powerful server in the cloud
and it is simply streamed to your device.
Although cloud gaming services like Google Stadia and NVIDIA GEforce Now grabbed a lot of
headlines when they were first only rumors, given these promises, it’s easy to understand
the growth and popularity of cloud gaming.
Think about it.
Bleeding edge games on everyday devices, and in most cases
you don't need to buy each individual game, only pay a small monthly subscription fee.
One thing is certain.
Cloud gaming has definitely revolutionized the entry cost to high performance gaming.
Unfortunately, one way to kill a revolution is inaction.
In the case of cloud gaming, that inaction is latency.
Latency is the bane of the online/cloud gamer existence.
Latency refers to how long it takes for data to travel between its source and a destination.
The lower latency is, the better.
In the terms of the cloud gamer, latency or lag is a delay in getting data from the device
in your hands to a computer in the cloud and back again.
So what does this look like when you are playing?
Let’s say you are running around the map, you notice someone that you can sneak up on,
you get close and press the trigger to shoot.
Then about a second later you see the person turn around and shoot you.
Gah... latency!!
So how do we minimize latency and get the most out of our experience?
The first thing you should do is run a speed test and search for your ping value.
Again, if we already know that latency is the time that it takes for my controller and
map data to go up to the server and to come back from the server, ping is the command
that reports latency in a unit of time, normally in milliseconds.
For an optimum gaming experience, we recommend striving for a ping of 50 milliseconds or lower.
When your ping is 100 milliseconds or higher your gaming experience will be severely degraded.
If you can, always and I mean always, get off of wifi and onto a hardline.
There will be much lower signal degradation from the router.
Ok, we know that it is not possible for everyone to avoid using wifi, say if you are on your phone for example.
In that case, wifi will be faster than cell data.
Always try to use the 5GHz connection; it will generally be faster with lower ping times.
Also, make sure that you're in the line of sight from your router.
If you have to use a 2.4GHz connection these same rules apply.
Ok, let’s say you have followed all of these tips and you are still getting pings higher than 50ms.
It may be time to replace your router.
The best way to check this is by doing the following.
Take a laptop to your router and modem.
Connect the laptop via LAN to the router and run a speedtest.
Take note of the ping value.
Next, connect the laptop directly to your cable modem and run the same speedtest.
If they are the same and you are still experiencing issues, it's your Internet Service Provider.
If these ping values are different, it might be time to buy a new router.
It happens, remember older routers can’t handle the
amount of data and simultaneous streams of data that we are sending today.
This leads to the final point: if you did all of these tips and improved your ping don’t ruin it by
starting a gaming session while simultaneously streaming Netflix, downloading a Linux distribution and uploading a YouTube video.
Actually, if you are competing with me go ahead and kill your latency, I won't mind a bit.
Since you made it this far, how about a bonus tip?
If your router supports prioritizing game traffic, do it.
There will be times where you may need multiple devices connected for gameplay.
Your router will make sure the devices running the game will get the most bandwidth.
But I can’t stress enough the importance of using this feature.
I have seen people that think they have the best internet, forget to implement this and
as soon as multiple devices start going the internet comes to a crawl.
So that does it!
Now we can all go back to our friends and tell them again about the losses that we are going to be giving out.
So schedule that Halo Infinite game after work and remember that this time will be different.
We verified our connection and made sure our ping was lower than 50ms thanks to all of the tips.
People, we will not FAIL!!!
Remember failure is not an option.
At least not in this dojo.
My name is Trisha Hershberger and I’ll see you next time in with more DIY in 5.