> I just wanted to get the opinions of some respected programmer to know if > lowering your screen resolution will help reduce your ping and hopefully get > a simply explaination why. I personally think it does make a difference but > the person I've spoken to about it points out that rendering for graphics is > client side. But i know that things off screen aren't completely sending > information to the client since they aren't being rendered and that I'd > imagine this extends to distant obects which wouldn't be rendered at lower > resolutions and thus reduce the network traffic a bit as if it was off > screen.
I think it really depends on your video settings. The most noticeable difference will probably be using the default Software rendering mode (instead of OpenGL or Direct3D). Reducing the resolution will require less pixels to be drawn which will take less CPU time to render a frame. This will increase your framerate. If the CPU is spending less time rendering pixels, it has more time to spend sending network packets (up until the point it reaches the cvar network limits). The people who would notice this the most are people using Software rendering mode, with slow CPUs, low amounts of RAM and high speed network connections. As you mentioned, things outside the PVS (potentially visible set) don't need to be sent to a client, but the framerate of the client won't (or shouldn't) effect how often the server sends packets to the client. The server will have it's own independent framerate and will send any necessary data to the client during each of the server frames. If the server is heavily loaded, then there won't be much the client can do to improve the latency between the client and the server (if anything sending more data to the server will only cause it to slow down ever so slightly). The framerate of the client will effect how often it can send data to the server. A low framerate on the client will more than likely mean that the client is CPU bound and won't be able to send network data as quickly as it should. Anything that increases the framerate on the client could potentially reduce some of the latency between that client and the server. Jeffrey "botman" Broome _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
