Need a gaming card to work with fiber optic cables?
Need a gaming card to work with fiber optic cables?
I recently switched to fiber internet at 100 Mbps, but I think I want to upgrade to the gigabyte plan. I would like to pay extra money to put a gaming network card on my fiber connection. Can anyone suggest me a good network card for this?
Why do people playing shooters act so silly? Just like a 100 megabit internet connection, a gigabit plan is just as fast. It lets you download games quicker, but it doesn't speed up the signal in the wire or fiber. That signal only travels at about a certain percentage of the light speed. An online game uses way less than one megabit, so having more won't make the game run faster or smoother.
Actually, I'd say that's just your imagination. But some action game players think they were born with super eyes and reflexes to beat everyone else. If you switch from a basic cable line to a faster fiber line, it might cut your lag by 5 or 10 milliseconds. That won't really matter because video games are built so that having less lag never helps anyone win. If you dropped the lag way too much, like 100 milliseconds higher, then yes, that would make a difference. But switching between fiber plans will look exactly the same. The real limit isn't on your connection; it's actually artificial. The speed going from your house to the ISP router is always at its very maximum. Most systems use GPON which runs at 2.5 gigabits per second. So no matter what plan you pick, your data leaves your house at that top speed. If you try to download big files, the ISP will slow down your rate to 100 megabits per second, but the actual data transfer is still running at full speed of 2.5 gigabits. You see a lower number because it's an average. Let's say your computer only uses half the time for a download and waits for nine seconds. Your average speed comes out to 100 megabits per second. If you used one tenth of a second for the data and waited for ninety-tenths, you still get that same average rate. So it doesn't matter which plan you pick; your actual data is running at full speed whether it's fiber or whatever standard your ISP uses.
You usually see faster internet speeds when the signal goes straight from your ISP to your home router. However, a direct line between your modem and PC gives zero lag if you use regular ethernet without cheap cables. If you have to run a long wire from the modem to your computer using copper wire, it's totally fine for now.
What makes a game feel smooth? It's mostly about being fast at all times. That speed is called consistent latency, or jitter. Fiber cables and fiber lines have little to no delay compared to regular wires. Coax can be slow if you are only using it for one house, maybe within a mile of the box your neighborhood has. Once you get close to where the internet comes in from the ISP company, there is some extra work needed to switch it back onto a fiber line that goes all the way back to their offices. This isn't like having dedicated fiber right at home; instead, many neighbors share one long strand of fiber together, just like with regular coax cables. Fiber technology uses a protocol called GPON, and coax uses DOCSIS. These two systems are very similar in how they work. There might be small differences between the internet companies and how they connect to other game centers or servers, but this does not matter because it happens after you get to your house. Bandwidth is just about having enough speed, which doesn't help with gaming at all. Small changes in latency won't make a noticeable difference for most players. What really matters is jitter. Games use the time between sending data and receiving it to guess what will happen next on the server side. They are pretty good at this prediction. Problems happen when that wait time gets too long, like going from 80 milliseconds to over 150 milliseconds or more. If the server makes an old plan for you but your connection is now much slower, your game will lag behind and try again until it figures things out. But in most cases, players can't do anything about jitter because it happens outside their house and affects both fiber and coax lines. This is why playing online games on wifi is not a good idea. The internet speed over wifi changes all the time and is very unstable.
One gigabyte will let you download updates faster. It feels good, but if there are others downloading games while you play, your ping won't change much. If you do have people in the house doing that, 100 megabits per second is easy to get full on with a new game update. So I'd go for one gigabyte when that happens.