Does downloading affect gaming performance?

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Mr.CookieMonster

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Hi,

I am currently downloading Adobe Master Collection CS5.5 from Adobe (as a trial). It has being going for 30 hours so far, 4 Hours left.

I decided to play Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare with the PezBot Mod. I put 11 pezbots on my game. I was lagging like my old computer (Geforce Go 7400).

My computer has a core i7 processor (quad core) and 6gb of ram as well as an Nvidia GT 525M 1GB DDR3 graphics card using the 296.10 driver for Windows 7 64 Bit.

What was the cause for me lagging? I know I would get between 40 - 50fps playing COD4 at its highest settings, now im lagging? Is it because of the download that is causing it to be slow?

Thanks
 
A download should only really affect you lag wise if you are playing online.
 
Doesn't affect me, but then again I limit the download traffic to 50%. (4 meg)
 
I think it might be the download, its not only COD4 that is lagging, Split second is lagging, and I set it to medium graphics :twisted:
 
I set my downloads to 80%, leaving me about 25KBps for general online use and gaming. Works perfectly fine.
 
Mike Hoxbig said:
I set my downloads to 80%, leaving me about 25KBps for general online use and gaming. Works perfectly fine.
Click to expand...

I have 384kbps, the line will only let me do 1 thing at a time (due to my poor speeds :D).

I am not online gaming, I am playing COD4 locally on my laptop, through the pezbot mod (allows you to add bots onto your lan match). It lags for some reason, I would normally get 40 to 50fps for COD4 with 11 bots on the game.
 
Any form of downloading will affect gaming performance (depending of course, what type of game and what type of downloading you're doing)

TCP/UDP packets are sent and received in order. So your data stream would look something like this:

game
download
download
game
game
game
download
download
download

If you're downloading via HTTP, the download will get preference over the gaming data. Which means you'll be suffering lag on the gaming front because those packets arrive later. Depending on the game and how they programmed the protocols (some use UDP, which doesn't have an "acknowledgement" of data being processed and is more susceptible to lag spikes if packets arrive in different order, which can happen due to the shaping of protocols), it won't matter how low you set your graphics. It's doesn't matter how fast a PC you have to process the graphics/game, but how fast/saturated your line is from downloading.

This becomes even more unplayable when you have multiple threads (torrents) downloading in the background. Even if you limit the speed of the torrents, theoretically you'd be able to saturate your internet line with the amount of connections to/from your PC.
 
ngadao08 said:
I have 384kbps, the line will only let me do 1 thing at a time (due to my poor speeds :D).

I am not online gaming, I am playing COD4 locally on my laptop, through the pezbot mod (allows you to add bots onto your lan match). It lags for some reason, I would normally get 40 to 50fps for COD4 with 11 bots on the game.
Click to expand...

You're one of THOSE people ;) Bots...lol

It doesn't matter that you're playing locally, you're still using the LAN protocols of the game, which effectively wants to use (and maybe even uses) your internet connection.
 
hereticangel said:
QoS on adsl modem hardly works, you need a mikrotik routerboard , then you can shape ports etc.
Click to expand...

Lol. I have a Cisco/Linksys WAG320N and it works brilliantly.
Did you think I suggested something without actually trying or using it myself :rolleyes:
 
Last edited:
The QoS on the Linksys WAG320N does look much better than the crappy QoS on D-Link ADSL modems.

Mike Smit, what ADSL speed are you connecting at? 4Mbps? 10Mbps?
 
AcidRaZor said:
Any form of downloading will affect gaming performance (depending of course, what type of game and what type of downloading you're doing)

TCP/UDP packets are sent and received in order. So your data stream would look something like this:

game
download
download
game
game
game
download
download
download

If you're downloading via HTTP, the download will get preference over the gaming data. Which means you'll be suffering lag on the gaming front because those packets arrive later. Depending on the game and how they programmed the protocols (some use UDP, which doesn't have an "acknowledgement" of data being processed and is more susceptible to lag spikes if packets arrive in different order, which can happen due to the shaping of protocols), it won't matter how low you set your graphics. It's doesn't matter how fast a PC you have to process the graphics/game, but how fast/saturated your line is from downloading.

This becomes even more unplayable when you have multiple threads (torrents) downloading in the background. Even if you limit the speed of the torrents, theoretically you'd be able to saturate your internet line with the amount of connections to/from your PC.
Click to expand...

Very true, but was he playing single player? maybe the download is using a lot of CPU and resources(like my firefox) and on and old CPU
 
Yes there will always be an impact. In most cases however it will be negligible. Latency will definitely be affected if you are playing online, and if your system is barely able to run the game normally the added stress of the download might just be enough to make it unplayable. Remember when downloading the file needs to be stored to disk every few minutes, and that will affect your gaming performance unless you have multiple hard-drives or your hard-drives are easily handling the gaming task.
 
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