[Beowulf] Re: Cheap SDR IB

[David Mathog]

Joe Landman <landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
> Gilad Shainer wrote:
> 
> >> IB for gaming?  I have one ratio: 1e-1/3e-6.  that's human 
> >> reaction time versus IB latency.
> >>
> > 
> > Oh yes... I guess you did not play for a long time. Did you? Talk
> > with someone who suffer from lagging and you will get the story, even
> > When he has a great video card. It's the network and the CPU overhead
> > that are the cause of this issue 
> 
> Er... ah ... yeah.  Milliseconds is typical in FPS games.  hundreds of 
> ms are bad.  Hundreds of microseconds aren't ... ok, depends upon your 
> FPS, I am sure the military folks have *really* fun ones which require 
> that sort of latency.

Many FPS games are still keyboard driven, and the scan rate on the
keyboard is likely only on the order of 10Hz.  Gaming mice scan position
a lot faster though, last I looked they were closing in on 10000 data
points per second. Even so, human reaction time is now, and probably
will be forever, at the .1 second level, so even if that gaming mouse
could record 1000 button presses a second, no gamer is ever going to be
able to push that button at anywhere near that rate.

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.

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech