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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

All excellent points but I'd remove gamers from there:

> (gamers and video professionals being an exception)

I play Stadia, 4K HDR 60FPS, just fine on a gigabit ethernet connection and 150MBit internet connection. Any games not streaming the entire video are fine with just kilobits/s of data, as long as the latency is good.

So the case for home 10GE is even weaker ;)

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Gamers aren't a strong answer :D but they're the audiophiles of home computing hardware and networks and the most likely to overspend in the belief that it's better :D

Gamers being hard wired has everything to do with consistent latency in twitch style FPS's. That said, consistent latency is pretty beneficial in most PVP games.

Hm, that's taking it a bit far given that I've yet to see any gamer who believes that e.g. taping plastic bags with gravel to their network cables [1] will lower their ping times (if it is not for weighing down a cruddy connector which only works when you press the damn thing down, that is). There does not seem to be a gamer-equivalent of $30000 speaker cables [2] (8 ft., add $1500 per additional ft.) or $10.000 power cables [3] either. No, audiophiles still hold the biscuit for being the most easily deluded moneyed demographic out there. If Hans Christian Andersen were alive today he'd write a story about it, "The Emperor's new Speaker Cable" [4] where a little boy is the only one who dares to comment on the piece of rusty barbed wire connecting the speakers to the amplifier.

[1] https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm

[2] https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-sc...

[3] https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-ac...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes

I love how much more ridiculous this has gotten since I last looked at this space ~15 years ago.

Oh. Really?

Why not compare the insane prices of thermal paste and compounds per volume/weight with the stuff that is used industrially?

Not always, but often used for results which could be called statistic noise. Very diminishing returns.

All for pushing reviews with many bar graphs over two dozen pages, and so much more page impressions. Like the rest of gamermedia, too.

Woo!

Show me the diamond-dust cooling paste for $10000 per CPU and you'll be right - for a little while. Soon you'll find that paste in larger $50.000 thimble-sized containers to be rubbed under all equipment "to open up the sound stage". Raving reviews will come in, "as if the composer is standing next to you", "the lows were really clearing up, as if the sun broke through the clouds".

Hm, k. BUT...everything counts in large amounts :)

So we have the very few audiophiles which totally ignore the thin copper layer on cheap PCBs, versus the whole market segment of twitchy gamers going for Bling, Bling, Bling without function on their RAM, coolers, vs. the equivalent stuff installed in laptops and servers which lacks that :-)

Seems like they're saying that gamers would prefer wired to wifi, which I think is reasonable - it's not so much a bandwidth issue as a latency issue - wifi has higher latency, and higher variance than wired ethernet, especially if you get a crappy client joining and filling up the airtime with retry attempts. But maybe that's dominated by ISP variance for most.

> as long as the latency is good.

Which is what rules out wifi :)

You probably even don't need gigabit. A Stadia stream ranges from 10Mbit to 50Mbit depending on the quality settings. Latency and other network users are far more influential on gameplay.

I understood GPs point to be “everyone is pretty much on wifi except professionals and gamers anyway”.

Weird, SteamLink on gigabit ethernet is barely useable here

Looks like SteamLink only has a 100mbit/s NIC? People do often vastly overestimate how much bandwidth things need. The latest 4K HDR Blu-rays are easily streamable over 100mbit/s with a big enough buffer. A big buffer is no good for real-time gaming, of course, so they probably cap the peak bitrate to <100mbit/s which would be fine I imagine.

It's the steamlink app of a samsung tv which is from 2020, I doubt it's 100mbit

You might be surprised. There are still quite a few 100mbit/s NICs shipped in new things. It would save them a few pennies. Raspberry Pis only got gigabit NICs in 2018 and only usable at gigabit speeds in 2020. Pis are more capable than a lot of smart TVs I've seen.

Perhaps more of an encoding performance issue on the host computer?

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