Lag is killing games

Part Two!

Did you miss part one? See page 64 to get hold of it

Latency is the biggest problem affecting online games today, from the biggest AAA titles to the smallest of indie games. A problem is that most games programmers, while being experts at graphics and physics programming, know comparatively little about the internet and the black-box that’s commonly referred to as “net code”. This, in turn, leads to poorly optimised game servers that are incredibly susceptible to fluctuations in latency, being deployed on hosting providers that oversell the quality of their networks while vastly under-delivering.

In a 2021 study completed by Plaintextnerds on behalf of Gameye (a provider-agnostic managed game hosting solution), it was discovered that seven of the 11 hosting providers included in the study (including one owned by a games publisher) suffered from jitter so extreme that it hit the upper limit of the test at more than one second of peak latency. Which, needless to say, would result in a terrible online gaming experience.

Jitter and latency

So how do you go about fixing this? First, you need to understand a few fundamentals about the sources of jitter and latency. You’ll probably have read somewhere that the primary root cause of latency is distance, and while that statement is true, it’s