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My kid brother has received complaints from several people over the months that the computer he uses (mine) barely even meets the minimum of what is considered decent enough for a good game of Supreme Commander online. Here are all my specs I know, or think may be, relevant:

Operating System: Windows Vista (64-bit)
Processor: AMD Athlon X2 7750(2.7GHz) Dual Core
Memory: 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800
Video Card: 896MB EVGA GTX 260
Hard Drives: 500GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 7200RPM
CD/DVD Drive: 20X DVD±R/±RW Dual Layer Drive
Sound Card: Integrated
Power Supply: 550W VX Corsair

Is it really that bad? Does anyone who plays on my computer deservedly go on a blacklist as computers that unfairly slow everyone else down? If yes, what do I need to do to fix it?

I remember asking my brother twice for two different complainers to explain what they think is a good enough computer to play Supreme Commander at decent speed. The first person asked seemed to me just another douchebag who loves listing his computer specs every chance he gets. He mentioned the size of his monitor, for fuck's sake, and explained that it is relevant to speed because it means more pixels. Or am I the one who is ignorant, and my 20" Acer AL2002W is actually ruining a good game for everyone? Also, he said that you need a quad core processor. Does this game even utilize a quad core processor? I thought most games don't make use of it yet?

The second complainer listed dual core and 4GB of RAM as the BARE MINIMUM for good gameplay (if even that). Is this true?

Gah! How did I end up here, lol? I could have sworn I clicked G&C. I hope I'm not the only one who ever did that. Please, moderator, bail me out.

Yes, unfortunately that just isn't a very good system and probably won't run any games (even diablo 2) very well. The only thing I can reccomed is selling it and building a new one. The problem is it's not worth much and you wouldn't be able to get $100 for it. Actually I'll do you a huge favor and buy it for $100, but you'll have to pay for shipping.

Be sure not to actually price any new systems or components until the old one is actually in the mail to me or else you might... er, jinx it. (yeah jinx it lets go with that)
Spoiler

*Kicks the grot*

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

That sounds fine for playing the games, chances are he's playing with somebody who has a shitty internet connection, or his internet connection is kind of shitty. That will affect online gaming more than the specs.

I have Verizon DSL. Dslreports.com says that I have 1308kb/s down, and 373kb/s up. Is that too shitty, or is it OK?

Haruko wrote:I have Verizon DSL. Dslreports.com says that I have 1308kb/s down, and 373kb/s up. Is that too shitty, or is it OK?

What's the ping response like?

General Zod wrote:What's the ping response like?

Dslreports.com says I have a latency of 29ms. Is that what you mean?

Haruko wrote:

General Zod wrote:What's the ping response like?

Dslreports.com says I have a latency of 29ms. Is that what you mean?

Yes your just fine. Try a server a decent clip away from you IE East coast if your west or west if your east. So try New York servers to get a better idea of your "real" ping. If it's under 100 your doing just fine for FPS's let alone Supcom.

Mr Bean wrote:Yes your just fine. Try a server a decent clip away from you IE East coast if your west or west if your east. So try New York servers to get a better idea of your "real" ping. If it's under 100 your doing just fine for FPS's let alone Supcom.

Thanks for the tip. I tried New York, which was halfway to full load at the time, but still put me at just 65ms latency.

Haruko wrote: Thanks for the tip. I tried New York, which was halfway to full load at the time, but still put me at just 65ms latency.

Yes your just fine. 100 MS is of course one second. And right up until about a second and a half (150ms) most game codes can compensate and get everyone running on the same page and put up where everything should be about a second from now. At 65ms your much closer to seeing were everything IS now at just over half a second delay. More than sufficent for your puny human reflexes not to notice the difference.

Whoever told your kid brother these stuff is clearly just being mean or being an idiot. That system is way better than mine. You have twice the RAM and a much more powerful graphics card, with more than enough space to make it run.

He mentioned the size of his monitor, for fuck's sake, and explained that it is relevant to speed because it means more pixels.

Yes, it means that games will run slower as they need more computational power to display those "extra" pixels.

Also, he said that you need a quad core processor.

The only game that I know that even uses quad core is Arma 2 and even that runs fine on an old DUO like mine. And I'm quite certain that Arma 2 has way higher requirements than some 2 year old game.

The second complainer listed dual core and 4GB of RAM as the BARE MINIMUM for good gameplay (if even that).

Only if you masturbate at your clock speed.

Er, Bean, don't you mean a just over 1/15 second delay?

Supreme Commander Forged Alliance has a number of game breaking issues where the overall simulation speed the game can run at drops like a stone. This is the result of a series of nasty memory leaks.

Mr Bean wrote:

Haruko wrote: Thanks for the tip. I tried New York, which was halfway to full load at the time, but still put me at just 65ms latency.

Yes your just fine. 100 MS is of course one second. And right up until about a second and a half (150ms) most game codes can compensate and get everyone running on the same page and put up where everything should be about a second from now. At 65ms your much closer to seeing were everything IS now at just over half a second delay. More than sufficent for your puny human reflexes not to notice the difference.

OK, so a member of my forum takes issue to the contention that any DSL connection is good enough. When I asked him what he finds wrong with what you say, he replied thus:

Well, first of all, milli means thousand, lmao. 100ms is a tenth of a second, not "of course one second." And it's an atrocious ping. 65ms is bad. 29ms is quite weak, but common and doable in a lot of circumstances. But if you had cable it would be a lot better. If you had FiOS it would be amazing. What affects gaming is mainly the latency, and DSL has a higher (worse) latency than other high-speed connections by design. The throughput (kb/s) doesn't affect gaming very much, though naturally more is better. It can start to have an impact when it's very low, especially the upload. An upload below 768kb/s is very low, 768 being best described as "okay." Yours is very low. It's having a big impact on your gaming.

What do you think? Do I need to get cable at the very least?

People whining about a 65ms ping are spoiled idiots. I can play games like Gears with Aus players with a 150+ ping and it will handle just fine. Personally I'd suggest finding other players.

He's completely batshit. Anything below 100ms is great, not 'atrocious', and 29 is about as awesome as you can expect with any server; with FIOS, I get higher than 30ms to most servers on the West Coast.

He's probably the kind of asshole who thinks it's necessary to "turn off unnecessary services", and could probably be goaded into saying something like "print spooler?! the fuck is this shit, are you trying to cheat on us?" at a LAN party.


I don't know what the upstream requirements for Supreme Commander are, but unless he's trying to play huge eight-player 1000-unit-per-side slugging matches, I rather doubt it's choking on his upload - unless there's filesharing going on at the same time.

Mr Bean wrote:

Haruko wrote: Thanks for the tip. I tried New York, which was halfway to full load at the time, but still put me at just 65ms latency.

Yes your just fine. 100 MS is of course one second. And right up until about a second and a half (150ms) most game codes can compensate and get everyone running on the same page and put up where everything should be about a second from now. At 65ms your much closer to seeing were everything IS now at just over half a second delay. More than sufficent for your puny human reflexes not to notice the difference.

isn't MS short for millisecond aka 1/1000th of a second?

edit my WoW ping is generally around 50-150 ms and the game it self doesn't consider anything below 600ms to be high

Lord Revan wrote: edit my WoW ping is generally around 50-150 ms and the game it self doesn't consider anything below 600ms to be high

WoW is also ten years old and build with slow internet connections in mind. For a game like supcom it really would be unplayable at a 600ms ping, but 150ms and under should be just fine.

Well, first of all, milli means thousand, lmao.

This alone should tell you that he is a moron. "Milli" means "one thousandth" in SI prefix, that is, 0.001 . Kilo means thousand.

I looked over your forum and he strikes to me like the type of guy that is a blowhard. He's saying that a ping of 76 is bad? Sounds like a CS-idiot drool to me, who thinks that a 2600 DPI mouse will make him aim better.

EDIT: Actually, scratch that. He says he doesn't game. His frame of reference must be suited for something completely else than games because even a CS-idiot drool would find a ping of 26 acceptable.

See here:

I knew the ATI cards that came out a couple of weeks ago would come out, and I wanted to see how they were. I don't game on PC so I can afford to wait on stuff like that.

Seems I need to clarify something about ping and rough standards.
Yes technically speaking a 65ms ping is .065 of a second not even half a second. But because of delays in process, transmitting, re-transmitting and exchanging of information via the server your not playing games at .065 delay your playing games at about a ten of a second to a full second delay. You lose packets that must be re-transmitted, you have to go via a different router route because one goes down. There's a hundred things in between you and server and between the server and whoever your playing against.

All these little delays add up to many small fractions of a second, they are "overhead" which your raw ping then adds to. Add to much to the overhead and the code can't compensate and things start jumping around as the server first compensates one way then another trying to display the same information on everyone's screen at the same time as it process the new information coming in and then re-updating everyone again.

It's why a 150ms ping is fine but a 300ms ping adds slight noticeable delay and 600ms is just almost impossible to play under for anything but slower paced MMO's. Your 65ms ping is your base, what gets added on top of every transmission of every bit of information to that server and your transmitting many times a second and receiving many times a second.

So when I speak of about half a second delay I'm adding in overhead automatically in my head but not noting it until now.

Zixinus wrote:I looked over your forum and he strikes to me like the type of guy that is a blowhard. He's saying that a ping of 76 is bad? Sounds like a CS-idiot drool to me, who thinks that a 2600 DPI mouse will make him aim better.

EDIT: Actually, scratch that. He says he doesn't game. His frame of reference must be suited for something completely else than games because even a CS-idiot drool would find a ping of 26 acceptable.

Most likely he's the only thing you'll ever find that's worse then a CS player: an Xbox Live player. :shudder:

Most likely he's the only thing you'll ever find that's worse then a CS player: an Xbox Live player. :shudder:

How come? How can they be worse than the racist, idiot, unintelligible lot that's your average CS player?

Also, a minor correction: he admitted that he does game, just not on the PC. I have no idea how he looks at connection rates but he clearly does not do it from a PC gaming standpoint.

Lol 100ms = a second

In an rts latency on his level is totally irrelevant. His shit system - especially if he's running high settings - could be messing with his traffic, but I've never seen that. Is SupComs netcode particularly bad?

And Zod, our pings to server are usually closer to 240. turns out it has no affect on anything but ghe shotgun lol.

Haruko wrote:

Well, first of all, milli means thousand, lmao. 100ms is a tenth of a second, not "of course one second." And it's an atrocious ping. 65ms is bad. 29ms is quite weak, but common and doable in a lot of circumstances. But if you had cable it would be a lot better. If you had FiOS it would be amazing. What affects gaming is mainly the latency, and DSL has a higher (worse) latency than other high-speed connections by design. The throughput (kb/s) doesn't affect gaming very much, though naturally more is better. It can start to have an impact when it's very low, especially the upload. An upload below 768kb/s is very low, 768 being best described as "okay." Yours is very low. It's having a big impact on your gaming.

What do you think? Do I need to get cable at the very least?

It is about 3000 miles between CA and NY. Based purely on speed of light limitations, it is physically impossible to get a ping under 31 ms going to NY. Your signal simply doesn't travel fast enough.