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Comment by nugga | Hacker News Reader

Starlink could be a godsent for online gamers. Anything under 100 ms for fps games is quite playable and you don't need much bandwidth for those udp packets. Just guarantee some minimum bandwidth allotment of say 1 mbps and make sure the satellites are not so oversubscribed as to cause unnecessarily long or unoptimized routing. Games between west coast usa and eu or eu and asia would be playable.

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If you're going to another continent, you're going to see a big latency savings. If your going to another state, you're probably going to get lower latency on fiber. But really, a 60Hz frame is 33.3ms, and many online games advance their world state at 60Hz too, so it's easy to get up to 67 ms of latency just sitting still.

A lot of people play with 144hz (what I play on) and some even higher (240hz). Which is just under 7ms and just over 4ms, respectively.

He's talking about network frames, not graphics frames.

You are right in that games have latency inherent to the processing of game engine ticks and depending on when you press the button the server might have just advanced to the next frame when your input gets processed and you're looking at another delay of potentially tens of milliseconds on top of network round trip and of course however long it takes the game to draw the updated info on your screen once the information gets back.

Wonder if it would make sense nowadays to send world state updates to clients at 1000 Hz or if it's even feasible?

is this really true? I haven't played video games in a long time, but I remember when playing counter strike that someone with a 20ms ping was at a significant advantage over someone with an 80ms ping.

I think playable is meant more in a "we can have a fun game" sense and less of a "I can be competitive at a high level" sense. Even the former becomes hard at higher latencies.

Sure, I'm using 4 G mobile internets now and occasionally have to play call of duty at around 80 ms and I can still kick ass. There's no place like LAN for hardcore competitive gaming but if the game's netcode is done well 80 ms is good enough. The trick is to have some sort of lag compensation, which cs should have as far as I know, where you don't have to lead your shots so the feel of the game is mostly the same, you just get the reports a bit later than you would at 20 ms.

Maybe this will help boost the "game as a service" offerings.

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