1y ago

With gaming's internet usage climbing, how do internet providers keep up?

www.eurogamer.net

20 comments

Alt title: ISPs attempt to avoid infrastructure upgrades unless paid for by others; points fingers.
Nothing new tbh.
- They hardly even do it when paid for others in the US at least. Gotta love bare minimums and lobbying to make those minimums really low.
Gaming uses extremely little bandwidth.
- Software updates can take quite a bit of bandwidth though. Call of Duty updates are significant events on the network, at the scale of streaming major sporting events.
- Read the 2nd sentence of the article. They are talking about 120gb CoD patches
  
  Still not a big deal. Literally why CDNs and bitorrent tech exist. Ads, spam, and crawlers totally eclipse this traffic. This is just the ISPs posturing to raise rates.
Counter: How do devs actually compress their fucking games? No reason games should approach taking up half of a hard drive.
- Do you know how much space I could save (and transfers that could be prevented) if they offered alternate branches that didn't pack obscenely large textures onto my steam deck for no reason? You already know what textures you load on low, medium, high, ultra texture quality settings. Steam offers branches that are easy for users who care to use. Why not use them?
  
  Imagine expecting things to be simple, though. Something something Murphy's Law...
- Decompression uses the cpu, so you loose performance if you compress textures.
  
  Just use delta transfer, and compress for transit and decompress on the host during install like steam does.
  Technology that's been around for decades and yet for some reason so many game launchers don't make use of it.
Sounds like we should start fining ISPs who can't/don't want to keep up.

20 comments