Latency and FPS

[Belteshazzar]

I run a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop and try to double and triple box occasionally. When I have a good connection, it is playable although not great. The question I have is related to the interplay between Latency and FPS, and internet connection and hardware specs. Just talking about single boxing for the moment, in 25 man raids I get about 200 ms latency and 20-25 fps when everything is ideal. This is playable and I have no issues. However, I travel each week and am on different internet connections constantly. Hotels seem to be the worst, especially playing at peak times. In hotels at peak times, the latency shoots up to 600 ms or so and the raid fps drops to 4 and sometimes worse on the initial pull. This is really unplayable, but at least I can understand what is happening here. This week I'm in a corporate apartment that has a standalone Cox cable modem connection and was expecting better performance. However, while my latency is fine (around 100-200 ms), my fps last night was again around 4 fps. This improved to about 10-12 fps around midnight. So I'm assuming the cable internet shares bandwidth with others in the area and during peak time I'm suffering. What I don't understand here is the interplay between latency and fps. It seems like they should be somewhat independent in that fps should be more reliant on my computer specs and latency more reliant on connection speed. Can someone set me straight on this? I really don't understand why my fps drop to 4 or even 1 at times when I have good latency. I originally was blaming my crappy laptop video card, but since it performs fine on my home connection, I would think it should perform fine anywhere.

Also, at home site, I run at higher resolution fine, but when traveling I knock it down to non-windowed 800x600 and everything on low settings and still have crappy FPS. Is there some hidden interplay between Fps and my connection speed that doesn't affect latency? Anything I can do to test an internet connection to see if that is the issue? Any other suggestions?


Thanks

[Lax]

There is virtually no link between your FPS, and your connection speed/latency. FPS is entirely determined by your own hardware specs, mostly your CPU and video card (or whatever video chip is in your laptop). I say virtually because there is a small amount of work to be done with handling network that affects your FPS, hence why companies like Bigfoot Networks try to sell you a heavy duty network card on the basis that it can increase your gaming FPS. But that's more about the volume of traffic handled (more = slower), and not so much about your latency. If you get the same amount of traffic, just at a higher delay (latency), your framerate should be roughly the same.

What else is different from when you play at home? Do you change the laptop's power settings? You have the laptop plugged in in both scenarios, right?

[Belteshazzar]

Lax, what you describe is what I had always thought and it makes sense. There really shouldn't be much correlation between latency and FPS. However, since I don't think I'm changing anything between when I'm at home versus away, I can't think of any other explanation. Also, in a hotel, my FPS is fine (around 15-20) if I'm playing mid-day when everyone else is at work, gets worse around 6-9 pm (when people come back to the hotel and start working/downloading) and improves again after 11 pm (when presumably there is less traffic). The latency also gets worse and improves during those times, but the fps is most affected, getting as low as 4 fps during peak hotel times. For sure in those instances I'm not changing anything else about my laptop configuration as I'm staying constantly plugged.

I know it doesn't make sense but was hoping to see if any other laptop users ever experience anything like this. Frustrating to say the least. Since I'm a regulary raider, I've been resorting to going to an internet gaming cafe ($2 per hour) - only drawback is I have to wear a dust mask/respirator because I can't stand the cigarette smoke!

Sorry for diverting away from dual boxing specifically, but the people on this site are more technical than most and thought I could find help. Also, I do dual box (mainly for leveling/questing) on my laptop when my connection allows it.

[Aldercy]

I agree with Lax in that your latency should not affect your frame rate and the first thing that came to mind was checking power profile settings. I was also wondering if your laptop is plugged into power whilst you play abroad.

One thought is that you’re running a very poorly coded mod. Add-ons can affect your frame rate and if your running one that uses the comms channel it could be putting some strain on your system during peek times, perhaps getting stuck in a loop whilst waiting on a response. I would probably try running WoW with all Add-ons disabled and see how that goes, if it helps try to minimize how many Add-ons you use or systematically go through them turning one on at a time to see if any one brings back your issue.

The only other thought I have relates to VPN. Since you are traveling abroad when this happens is it possible that you have an active VPN connection whilst playing WoW? If so then WoW will be traveling down the VPN and out the other end point to the internet. This will affect your latency, but it could also affect your performance as extra stress is being placed on your laptops CPU to encrypt and decrypt the connection.

These are both long shots, but either one is possible and in your case probably worth investigating.
- Aldercy

[Belteshazzar]

Thanks for the thoughts. I disabled all addons and didn't make much difference. Also, I'm not using VPN while playing, I only enable VPN when doing work stuff. And, I run the same power configuration regardless of location - fully plugged in and no power saving features. Really puzzles me. I'm wondering if there are other internet connection factors besides latency that are affecting me, but blizzard doesn't monitor those in game. Also, I'm wondering if there is something going on with my server on the blizzard side - wouldn't explain the difference based on location, but maybe it is just bad timing.

Thanks again.

[Sam DeathWalker]

All that is true but lantency will effect umm "latency lag" as vs. "texture lag". If you go to darlen or some place with tons of textures and spin in place the stuttering will be texture lag.

But if characters continue to run to a spot then warp back to another spot thats latencey lag. Your computer is not getting positioning updates from the sever fast enough so characters tend to "over run" their current position. Or when you press a spell cast and you don't see the effect for 2 seconds that again is latency lag. Or if you see a mob a bit away from you and suddenly it warps to you that is also latency lag.

[Freddie]

Like the other folks who answered, I don't see any obvious reason why there would be a connection between frame rate and latency. But it wouldn't surprise me if there is one, because there are stacks and stacks of software crammed into our machines and it's capable of interacting in odd ways and doing unexpected things. I'm inclined to think that you've observed things accurately.

If I were you, I'd do two things. (1) Call Blizzard and ask them about it. Their tech support people may know about this problem. (2) Use PerfMon (the performance monitoring tool that's built into Windows) to try to see how resource allocation and processes are changing when things run slow. Maybe something obvious will catch your eye immediately, like some other process getting so much CPU time at a higher priority that WoW gets squeezed out. I doubt it will be that simple but if you look hard enough you may see the direct cause.

Also -- I don't play WoW, so somebody correct me if I'm wrong -- but doesn't WoW save some sort of error log? Have you looked at it? Maybe it's going nuts trying to find a different network connection, or something like that.

[Belteshazzar]

I can try calling Blizzard, but I'm likely to get a pretty non-helpful answer like reinstall WoW or reset my UI. Worth a shot, however, so if I can get through to them we'll see. I'm definitely getting more "texture lag" than "latency lag" which seems to indicate a hardware problem. Like I mentioned before, the only puzzling thing is how it clears up as the night goes on, indicating to me that it is somehow linked to the internet connection, just not in an obvious way.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Post on the tech support forums is better then calling that way people have more time to get your question to the right person.

Well to render your screen your computer has to only know where you are and where others around you are. Clearly if the server does not update this information before its time to render the next screen you local computer just assumes that you, npc's and other players are moveing in the same direction they were are the last infromation send from the server. Thus even when you have no connection to the server you will still have a screen rendered ... its not like your screen goes blank, your computer just uses the lastest data from the server that it has.

Thus high latency will not give you texture lag, they are two completly independant things. If you have texture lag then you need to upgrade yur hardware.

If you have latency lag, outside of moving closer to your data center, you might pay for a higher internet connection or there are those network cards but I doubt if you get 10percent better with that. I think routers with QoS might help, but if you are running nothing else at the same time well then you will have top priority anyways.

[Aldercy]

A thought just occurred to me; have you done a scan of your computer for viruses and spyware lately? (This will probably be the first thing blizz suggests) I can think of a few reasons why this could be location dependant. I really am picking at straws here though but this wont harm and could help.

- Aldercy