On Wed, 30 Jan 2008, David Mathog wrote:
IB would be massive overkill for gaming, 100 (or even 10) baseT should work just fine unless the network is hideously congested, in which case the game is probably going to become unplayable due to dropped UDP packets.
And in fact most online games (e.g. World of Warcraft) are played over connections that are almost certainly slower than 1.5 Mbps -- my boys play (two or three at a time) over a shared DSL link at 768 kbps. It can be laggy if anyone (like me, yum updating a host or their mother working on her EMR) hogs the link but otherwise it is playable. Major lag in gametime is usually due to bottlenecks elsewhere. They accomplish this by putting movement in a lagged map of the "universe" on your local machine, and updating object data across the slow link as fast as possible to keep the Universe views of everybody in any given visual field in sync (PC and NPC alike). You can tell when certain network outages occur because you can e.g. move your character around but nothing happens and all the other players disappear. There are a few orders of magnitude difference between DSL (acceptable when it isn't too congested due to OTHER people using the line) and GigE, let alone IB. GigE >>or<< IB might well be able to run the gaming universe on the >>server<< and just render the display on the host without too much lag, but that's very different from what real RPGs do. rgb
Regards, David Mathog [EMAIL PROTECTED] Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
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