Gone are the days of playing offline disc games on PC or consoles. Competitive multiplayer has become more and more popular among gamers and video game companies for the long-term gains they provide. With so many high-speed internet packages to choose from, a very common question you might ask is: is 400 Mbps internet good for gaming?
For most online games, internet speed doesn’t matter much. 10 Mbps internet is more than enough. 100 Mbps is considered sufficient for downloading games, as most games do not exceed 100 gigabytes. So, if the connection is constant and stable, 400 Mbps internet is good enough for gaming.
Getting the proper connection is more perplexing than it should be because of the lucrative offers that ISPs come up with once in a while. So, basic knowledge is very important because your connection quality alone can determine victory or defeat. So let’s get started!
Is 400 Mbps Fast Internet?
First, let’s break down the unit of measurement of internet speed. We all know that 1 gigabyte equals 1024 megabytes. Most AAA game sizes these days range from 30 to 100 gigabytes, so having a rate of 400 megabytes per second is awesome, right?
Here’s the catch; Mbps and MBps don’t mean the same thing. Mbps stands for megabits per second, the standard unit of measurement of internet speed, and MBps is megabytes per second.
Internet speed is never measured in MBps. 400 Mbps means 400 megabits per second, not 400 megabytes per second. So, what is a megabit?
One byte equals 8 bits. If you want to measure your internet speed in megabytes, divide the given value by 8. 400 divided by 8 equals 50, so 400 Mbps internet speed means 50 MBps. It’s still quite good. You can download games from Steam or other similar servers at a reasonably fast rate.
From cached servers, you’ll get an insane amount of speed. Even from other servers, the download speed will be quite satisfactory. For streaming and other services like YouTube, Disney+, Netflix, etc., 400 Mbps speed is sufficient.
However, despite having such high-speed internet, you will not get the full benefits if your internet connection has high latency. I will discuss this topic in a separate section below.
Is 400 Mbps Fast Enough For Gaming?
400 Mbps is very, very fast for gaming. 400 Mbps is fast for almost anything on the internet, whether gaming, streaming, media consumption, or simply browsing.
There is an exchange of information between your computer and the game server in online games. The information includes a mouse, keyboard, controller, voice input, player location, etc. The data required to exchange this information is very minimal.
So, it requires very little download speed. The most commonly recommended download speed for online gaming is 2-3 Mbps, which is a lot less than the 400 Mbps mentioned above speed.
Upload speed also plays a role in online gaming. The information from your computer has to travel to the game server. Many gamers or even ISPs neglect the importance of upload speed, which shouldn’t be the case.
The good thing is that online games, even those with high graphics, require very little upload and download speed.
Even the cheapest connection is enough to get you over the line. No online game requires more than 5 Mbps of speed. So, 400 Mbps is high-speed for gaming.
How Much Mbps Do I Need For Gaming?
As far as speed is concerned, you won’t need more than 10 Mbps for online gaming.
Although the quality of your connection is more important for online gaming, internet speed still plays a significant role.
For single-player and other gaming-related activities, internet speed bears more importance than online gaming. Let’s discuss this in different sections:
Online Games
In online games, your computer sends information to the server and receives information. The information is small in size, so the amount of data exchanged at a time is not very large.
So, the necessary speed is also quite low; about 5 Mbps upload and download speed are good enough.
Single-player Games
Now let’s move on to single-player games. You don’t need an active internet connection to play single-player games, except for a few. Internet speed only matters when downloading games.
AAA titles these days are getting bigger. So, the higher the speed, the faster you can download your favorite game. A minimum of 100 Mbps download speed is recommended.
Streaming
For streaming games, your upload speed matters more than your download speed. For streaming at 1080p, you will need at least a dedicated 5 Mbps connection, and that’s the minimum.
There are a lot of factors like resolution, frame rate, audio quality, etc. If you want your stream to be of the highest quality, you will need a much higher speed.
What Is Internet Latency?
Internet latency, or ping, as known in the gaming world, is the time the server takes to respond to a request.
High ping is the worst enemy of gamers. There isn’t a better feeling than shooting your enemy right in the head. The worst feeling? Shooting first and still dying.
Most of the time, high ping is the culprit in cases like this. The lower your ping, the more advantage you have over your opponent.
Anything you do on the internet, the signal or command has to travel from your device to the server, and then the server will respond accordingly. The time required for the signal to travel to the server is called a “ping.”
In online games, when you click the mouse to shoot your enemy, the signal from the click has to travel to the server. Then the server registers the shot.
If the time it takes for the signal to travel is long enough, then you will experience things like shooting first but dying. It is because your enemy’s shot traveled to the server first, and the server registered the shot before yours.
This is called “internet latency.” Latency depends on the quality of the connection rather than internet speed. You may have fast internet but bad ping.
Ping also depends on the server’s physical distance from your computer. That’s why multiplayer games have different servers across the world.
Because players from Europe will get better ping than players from Australia on European servers, and that’s not fair. So, the servers are placed so that all players get pretty much the same ping.
Conclusion
When it comes to playing games, the importance of having high-speed internet is more significant than you could imagine.
You won’t realize it unless you have faced the repercussions of the below-average internet. I hope now you realize the very basics of the internet for gaming.