Harrow, on 29 January 2012 - 12:19 PM, said:
Yes but the increased CPU load caused by these games when you're graphics card isn't up to snuff can still have an effect on how fast you also process the network information that has to come to the CPU in the traditional ethernet stack. So unless you are running one of those fancy gamer NICs, your CPU/GPU load can have a cascading effect of lag. You can have a great connection and still have this issue occur because your cpu/gpu is bottlenecking your computers ability to even process the information being sent from server to client over a great connection. You normally don't notice this if you have a great rig, but not everyone does. And to address your point about anti aliasing or anistropic data not being sent over the connection; the data being sent tells your client 'where' to draw and not 'how' to draw. So if your CPU/GPU is still busy rendering the information it received 30ms ago it will lead to the appearance of 'server' or 'net' lag, when in fact its PC computational lag.
Again, I disagree Harrow. For network information to "overload" your computers ability to process data and graphical information, your computer would have to be so old it couldn't even install games made in the last decade.
Every gamer network card review I've read has shown an improvement of 5% if even that. That's why not too many people have them. 100$ for like 2 more kbps isn't worth it. Unless you're using netflix and a bitorrent client while you play online games you probably won't notice any difference.
As far as I know, your graphics card being overwhelmed does not affect your cpu. They process entirely different information. When you want to benchmark your cpu, you send your graphics and resolution as low as possible. When testing just the GPU, you set everything high. Your cpu doesn't take over or pick up the slack of your gpu and vice versa.
And I'm sorry but I don't agree with a slow computer causing the appearance of internet lag/latency. I mean, at least I can tell the difference.
I know you probably just threw this number out there but 30ms is probably unnoticeable by human beings. 1ms is a thousandth of a second. Human reaction time is around 200ms.
Again, my information is probably out of date as I haven't been "hardcore" as far as pc hardware in about 2 years but I still try to keep up with new hardware and benchmarks.