Is 200Mbps Fast Enough For Gaming?

Have you ever wondered what your ping would look like at 200 Mbps to 300 Mbps? As a gamer, it’s important to know the capabilities of your internet connection. After all, no one wants to be stuck in the middle of a game with a laggy connection.

In this article, I  will be discussing the capabilities of 200Mbps when it comes to gaming. With this information, you’ll be able to make the best decision for your gaming internet speed needs.

To start with, Mbps means Megabits per second, and for those who are playing online games, this would be the main determinant of how fast the game was to run. Note that your Mbps may also vary depending on the number of people connected to your internet service.

The average megabits for high-performance gaming would be 200 megabits upwards. This is also influenced by the ISP and the type of laptop or device you are using. 

A user with Wi-Fi 6 on their laptop would be able to access more megabits of its service provider than a laptop using Wi-Fi 4 or a cabled internet connection. The hardware determines the speeds of the internet on the device.

What Are You Using The Connection For?

Predicting how much speed each common task requires is relatively straightforward. Suppose you want to stream an HD video; for sites like YouTube and Netflix, you would need within 5 Mbps to 10 Mbps if you want your experience to be reliable. 

Of course, if you want to stream 4K, your data rates will be higher; most popular streaming platforms recommend anywhere from 40 Mbps to 50 Mbps.

 This would account for any dips in your service speed during heavy load time or if a windows update is running in the background somewhere. The thing to keep in mind, though is that this is on a per video basis, so if you want to stream on more than one screen, you need to multiply that initial speed times the total number of videos that you foresee your household playing on your connection at once.

Next, we have to consider the heavy data doings, besides streaming video like gaming. It might surprise you to know that you don’t need insane speeds to have a great gaming experience. Typically, it will probably be enough if you can have at least ten megabits per second free on whatever device you’re gaming on.

 The more important consideration for gaming is going to be latency. This is the delay between your computer or your phone requesting something from the server and the server sending the data back to you, and vice-versa. 

It is also possible to have a service that boasts high speeds but also suffers from high latency, which can result in weird lag behaviour while you’re gaming and the tricky thing here is that as you pay more for a higher speed tier, your latency may not improve at all.

Latency

What you should understand by the word “latency”, is that it is the delay between your computer or device requesting something from the server and the server sending it back to you, and vice versa. 

One thing to keep in mind is that low latency is also equally important for other real-time applications such as skype, and zoom.

One more gaming and video chatting specific consideration is that, unlike web browsing, it’s important to make sure that you are getting a decent amount of upstream speed for these applications. A solid 10 to 15 megabits per second per device should be fine for high-quality video calls and streaming to Twitch in the high-quality definition.

What are the Consequences of Having a Slow Internet Connection?

• Slower response times due to increased latency and lag
• Slower download time
• Your Data is consumed much faster
• Poor overall gaming experience
• Poor in-game coordination and communication with friends and teammates

What are the Benefits of Faster Internet connections?

• Faster response time due to reduced lag
• Faster download speeds
• Improved gaming performance
• Improved communication and coordination with friends and teammates
•  A better overall gaming experience

Importance Of 200mbps To Gaming

For streaming, video calls, gaming, and transferring large files. The transferring of game installers is one of the things gamers use their internet to do. 

For example, if you were trying to download a 2GB movie, that would take about 2 minutes and 40 seconds on a 100 megabit per second connection.

Data Caps

These are limits that some ISPs put on their data service, where if you exceed a certain amount per month, you would be looking at consequences like fraud or extra charges. Now data caps shouldn’t be much of a concern for web browsing, but you can quickly run up against them if you are gaming or a ton of 4K video.

 For example, gaming runs up about 40 to 300MB per hour, watching 1080p videos consume about 1.5GB per hour and 4K videos consume an excess of 7GB per hour. With this information, you can calculate how much data you would be consuming on gaming and also know how high of a cap you might need every month.

The bottom line is that there is no point in overpaying for either speed or data with this information above available to you.

What Is The Best Connection To Have For Faster Mbps

This varies based on several things like the ISP, the country, and the hardware being used. For instance, using an Ethernet cable would give you speeds of 40 to 50 megabits per second, varying on the tasks being handled. The best option thus would be to use wireless connections that would then give you speeds of up to 100 megabits per second. 

Conclusion

When it comes to choosing an internet speed for gaming, Xfinity recommends going with a download speed of at least 200 megabits per second. This will give you plenty of leeways to transmit more data, so you’re less likely to run into any network constraints that could impact your gaming experience. 

Most people are perfectly fine with an internet speed range of 10 to 15 megabits, but if you’re planning on doing some heavy lifting like gaming or streaming with multiple devices, you’re going to need more. 

With today’s technology, you can get internet speeds as fast as 1000 megabits per second or as low as 3 megabits per second. So it’s really up to you to decide how fast you need your internet to be.

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