Testing Network latency and stability for gaming

[U Wut M8]

What is the best way to test your network for stability and latency for gaming? I was reading online but it just seemed like everyone said to use speedtest.net. Is that really the best way? I really don't care as much about raw throughput and just need stability for gaming. I wanted to compare 2 routers I had as well as compare this network card that my friend gave me to the integrated one on my motherboard. Thank you for the help!

[HanZie82]

There must be test suites for network testing.

I've rarely had the use for one, just using large files for bandwidth testing and real life usage.
Speedtest.net is nice to use, if you want to know network latency its a bit useless. Since its more to measure the mostly slower internet.

As for stability you could setup a command-line to constantly ping a known fast server.

 

There is no real substitute for testing gaming latency and such as just actually playing the game and evaluating that. (Maybe with its built in graphs and/or tools depending on the game for availability)

[ToboRobot]

Because networks are used by lots of people, any network test like a ping or traceroute will only give you an indication of what is occurring at that point in time., and over time network performance may vary.

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, U Wut M8 said:

What is the best way to test your network for stability and latency for gaming?

Play game(s).

 

Your personal router and network card will have a rather small impact on your internet connection. Consider the distance between you and the game server. The majority of that network route is outside your control. You can optimize your home network any way you want, but if the route between you and the game server is too long or congested, you'll have latency and stability issues you can't do anything about. Even if your test right now is fine, it's going to vary based on time of day and day of the week.

[U Wut M8]

Thanks for all the help! It would be nice if there was an already developed testing suite that could run a test every hour for 24 hours and display an average result for the network but I'll just try playing some games and see what gets me the lowest ping I guess. Thanks!

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 hours ago, U Wut M8 said:

Thanks for all the help! It would be nice if there was an already developed testing suite that could run a test every hour for 24 hours and display an average result for the network but I'll just try playing some games and see what gets me the lowest ping I guess. Thanks!

It wouldn't tell you anything useful.  You can have perfect ping results and poor gaming, as games aren't using the same protocol, to the same servers, with the same priority on the routers.  This is one reason why the ping in games wont reflect the result you get when using the ping command itself, as those games will be testing to the server you are using and probably using the games protocol, to get an accurate result of how quickly the server responds to you.

 

Worse still, some games penalise people with good latency in an attempt to "level the playing field" for those who have bad Internet.  So for some games a good connection can actually work against you.

[wseaton]

Internet Protocol is Internet Protocol. Doesnt matter if its a game or not. Its the degree of fragmentation the game server will tolerate that matters.

 

Network cards and modern routers don't affect latency. A weak 2.4ghz wifi signal that's struggling....maybe. Gaming moves very little data, but is sensitive to latency. Due to how game servers sync data and refresh its true all players in a session are averaged out according to connection speed. Ive had 1.5Mb T-1s have less latency than cable connections 100x faster.

 

Usually it's your ISP contributing to the most latency.

 

 

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

13 hours ago, wseaton said:

Internet Protocol is Internet Protocol. Doesnt matter if its a game or not. Its the degree of fragmentation the game server will tolerate that matters.

Its absolutely not that simple.

Ping usually uses ICMP, games usually use UDP.  Routers on the Internet can prioritise ICMP to make it appear they aren't congested when being pinged, or they can drop it to lowest priority so that unimportant traffic (such as ping) gets dropped or delayed when under load, rather than useful traffic.

Ping is also handled by the network stack on the server, but gaming traffic is handled by the game server software.  The game server could be completely maxed out, lagging and/or dropping traffic (due to bottlenecks in the software rather than bandwidth), while the server its actually running on has spare capacity to respond to ping like nothing is wrong.  The Ping response might not even come from the server itself, it could come from a router BEFORE the server, a load balancing server, or something doing DDoS protection, it depends on how the network is configured.

Thus even if you know the IP of the game server, pinging it is not necessarily any indication of how it will respond to game traffic.  Only the in-game ping which will most likely be talking to the server software itself can give some indication of the servers health.  But even there its a really small packet of data that is usually only sent every second at most, that in no way reflects the same complexity of actual game traffic, so its a rough guide at best.