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When it comes to reducing your lag, that condition of slow in-game responsiveness, there are two factors you must address: ping and frame rate.
Ping, a measure of a data packet’s travel time between you and a server, is dependent on your Internet connection, among other server-side factors. If you’ve got a home-standard broadband connection you should have a
latency of around 100ms or less with few problems other than being out pinged by players with T1 lines. Check different servers for your best ping and visit www.dslreports.com for broadband tweaks.
Dial-up players have a greater challenge. The first thing to do is to replace any Winmodem with a hardware modem. Winmodems leave certain processing to your to your sytem while hardware modems have a chipset on board
that takes care of processing on its own. Second, test different ISPs for your best ping. We happen to like PeoplePC for its consistent connections and ten dollar price tag.
Frame rate, or, FPS--the number of frames that are displayed per second, is dependent on your graphics card, the speed of one’s CPU, and amount of memory, among other factors. To gauge your 3D card’s performance in
Half-Life type cl_showfps 1 into the console during a game. 72 fps is Half-Life’s max while 30 fps is recommended as the bare minimum for smooth gameplay. We recommend a graphics card with at least 8MB of on board
memory. Visit our Graphics Card Guide for some shopping tips.
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