How much bandwidth does online gaming use?

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Ilitirit

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For example, two hours of Call of Duty 4 on the PS3/360?

I've got a shaped normal connection but I'm thinking of buy a couple of unshaped gigs for gaming, but I'm not going to waste my money if I'm going to burn through a gig in a few days.
 
firstly you only need unshaped if you are playing internationally... all local traffic is unshaped anyway.

I played about 2 hours of COD4 and 5 hours of Gears the other night (yes it was possibly the longest gaming session ever for me) and used about 300Mb of bandwidth...

That's including my normal surfing and stuff as well...

I game about 2-3 times a week and normally go through 2 gigs a month all in all...

Again it all depends on the game, who is hosting and which network you are one 360 or PS3
 
I have a PS3.

I don't play online much and I'll just get one of those pre-paid jobbies for gaming (maybe Axxess or WebAfrica).

I'm gearing up for GTAVI and MGS4 online though.
 
GTA 6 hey ;)


I use web africa since the bandwidth rolls over until I finish it...
If you are not going to be playing for hours a day I don't think you are going to find a major dent in your bandwidth usage...

HOWEVER those PS3 firmware updates are always over 100Mb so you need to cater for that as well.
 
It varies quite a bit.

If it's a well programmed game and there's not a lot of chatting about 40Mb/hour. If the okes are talking a lot it can go up to about 80Mb/hour.

If you host you can easily hit 120Mb - 150Mb/hour.

And like Gav said, unshaped is only for international games.
 
Yes, I am looking at an option now , never played online before but since I fell in love with COD4...
What is the best way to play online, Telkom hardline or will a Vodacom type modem work fine through your computer?
 
Cod4 uses only about 10mb an hour (according to my net limiter monitor)
 
Kage said:
Yes, I am looking at an option now , never played online before but since I fell in love with COD4...
What is the best way to play online, Telkom hardline or will a Vodacom type modem work fine through your computer?
Click to expand...

You really need ADSL to play properly... You can get online and play with 3G or HSDPA but your latency will normally be crap which means bad lag
 
For FPS latency is the most important part of the setup and unfortunately ADSL is King. It's not too bad though, if you go to somewhere like http://www.cybersmart.co.za/ you can get a 1Gb/384 for R169 per month, 3Gb/384 for R269. That's all inclusive, the only other component you need to pay for is the line.

Alternatively, by the sounds of things the new Neotel products sound like they have pretty reasonable latency, and should be out by the end of the month. Although I don't think wireless will ever be as good as wired.
 
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