How much download capacity is needed for PC gaming?

[dancingmatt]

Hi all

A bit hard to quantify this - I'm going to get my first broadband connection soon, expecting to pay about £15-18 for a 8Mbit connection, and probably not unlimited. It's going to be for some net surfing, email, etc. No major downloading.

However - I do also intend to use my new gaming PC online for the first time ever, and so this brings the question - how much downloading capacity might I need? I simply have no idea how much data comes and goes when playing online.

So does anyone have any figures, or would like to test something for me and play Company of Heroes/UT2004/Medieval II/Battle for Middle Earth/Call of Duty 2, or something else, for like an hour and measure how much traffic went either way?

I'm basically wondering whether a 4GB cap, for example, would get filled in a month if I gamed online for, say, 10 or 20 hours...

Any ideas?

Thanks all

DM

[Syd]

I had the same question. I was on an unlimited BT package and I wanted to change to a different pack ( to save some money)
I went on bt's site and they have a 'calculator' so you can put in what you intend to do online and it works out your monthly usage. I play about 20 hours a week max and find that my 8GB limit is fine. (I don't do masses of movie/music downloading)

[kempez]

An ~8gb limit will be fine for just gaming imo

[kalniel]

For gaming you need hardly any. 3gb or even less is more than enough - I only upgraded when I started doing game development and had to keep downloading latest revisions of whole games.

[badass]

You will find that downloading patches for games takes vastly more of your usage limits than the games themselves
Well thats my experience with BF2 anyway

[eggenstein]

I like playing Half life 2 online and I've downloaded 10gigs in the past month! thank god for unlimited!

[dancingmatt]

Thanks everyone for your info. So 8GB is enough for 20 hours a week? I'll be lucky to get that much time in!

eggenstein - 10GB just in playing HL2, or actually downloading patches/mods/maps/whatever as well?

I've been looking at Be's £15 24Mbit 4GB cap, and Eclipse Internet's £15 8Mbit unlimited. Obviously I think I'd prefer the 24Mbit speed of Be, but 4GB - not going to be enough for gaming and a bit of net surfing methinks...

Surprised there aren't some specific figures out there...

DM

[dancingmatt]

On a similar note, does anyone know how to find out the likely speed I'll get at my postcode?

uswitch.com says a maximum of 2Meg.

Eclipse, Be and others say "up to 8/up to 24/etc."

Bulldog says only 2Meg because I live more than 2kms from an exchange. Do I?

How can I find out?

DM

[adam1701]

From my experience... counter strike uses around 8-13kb/s down... and 3kb/s ish upload!

[eggenstein]

eggenstein - 10GB just in playing HL2, or actually downloading patches/mods/maps/whatever as well?

yes admittedly I download mods etc

[chuckskull]

http://www.bt.com/broadband/bb_info.jsp use BT to check your speed.

Gaming uses bugger all bandwidth.

[dancingmatt]

Aha - cheers chuckskull. Turns out it's likely to be "up to 5Mbit".

Now is that because BT Broadband don't offer anything faster than 8Mb anyway, or is it the cold hard truth of the phone line and so going with Be will be absolutely pointless because I won't get more than about 5Mbit anyway?

Hmmm... Eclipse is looking like the one then...

stinger161 - thanks for the cs info. So based on that, call it 12kb/s down, that's 43.2Mb an hour, 864Mb for 20 hours. Not a problem then!

Hang on, is that kilobits kb or kilobytes kB?

Dm

[snedger]

Do you have a home network sharing the bandwidth?
Had to upgrade from 2meg to 10meg to allow 2 users to get enough bandwidth playing CS:S - but even that isn't perfect.
Probably needs me to try and get my head around traffic shaping, but each time I try and read up about it I just feel like closing my eyes and going to sleep.

[Trash Man]

A 4 hour WoW raid uses about 70mb. So next to nothing really, not worth thinking about.

[Nick Smith]

i love being 14 it means i dont have to worry about bandwith...as my mum pays for unlimited broadband...so i have no idea what uses how much bandwidth

[kidzer]

You will have to worry when you go over your allowance, 'cause i'm sure there will be one hidden in the T&C's