Video games don’t trigger violence, but internet latency does.
As early as more than ten years ago, when the parental media at that time were still discussing the harm that games would have on children, someone put forward this joking point of view to refute it.
Although this sentence gradually evolved into a well-known stalk later, it also shows another point-no matter what era it is, network delay has always been the number one culprit that destroys the game experience.
In September this year, in a survey report on network delay jointly released by foreign software company Edgegap and market research company Bryter, it showed that among the several game problems that players worry about, “network delay” is still the most frequently mentioned problem. options, even more than “plug-in”, “excessive reading time” and “Pay
to win”:
Among the surveyed players, 39% listed “delay” as the most unbearable factor
It is worth mentioning that these respondents are all mild-to-moderate gamers aged 18-55, who spend an average of 8-9 hours a week on online games, and coincidentally, 97% of them Players all said that they experienced network lag, and nearly half of them believed that “latency” was the element that brought them the most frustration, so much so that they would quit the game directly.
As the saying goes, “All players with a good network are the same, but players with a poor network have their own skills.” Since the birth of online games, players all over the world have naturally complained about the network environment.
There is a very famous series called “Lag in real life” on Youtube and Douyin abroad. The creative idea is to assume that what happens if there is network delay in real life. A writer named “Daniel
The YouTube author of “LaBelle” has shot a lot of short videos of this type, respectively imagining the delays that humans may encounter in different occasions. With accurate restoration and complaints, this video has exceeded 30 million views hits.
This kind of complaints that gamers like to hear is naturally a high-quality creative direction. Since there are delays that humans will encounter in different scenarios, there must be interpretation effects of different network speeds in the same situation:
In addition to bringing a bad experience to players, network delays often cause other unexpected effects. Sometimes it’s a cultural export.
In the first DOTA2 Asia Invitational Tournament in early 2015, due to on-site equipment and network problems, there were frequent game freezes and disconnections during the game, and Chinese players did not use “Lag” when requesting a timeout Standard vocabulary, but blurted out “Ka
le”
This word was also known by more foreign netizens following this game, and soon some people began to analyze what is “Ka le”:
As more and more players use this meme, “Ka le” has also become the common language of foreign DOTA players. In another game later, when the network delay appeared, the foreign players on the road began to skillfully Use “KA
LE” to express dissatisfaction with the network conditions, but the Chinese player played “lag” in a regular manner:
The word was used so frequently that it was even included in Wiktionary later as a true gaming slang term.
Of course, in the arena of e-sports, “network delay” causes more disputes about fair competition, and in most cases, this kind of dispute is not like a simple “Ka le”, which is often unfriendly, sometimes Even full of gunpowder.
In the “League of Legends” MSI mid-season game held in May last year, a debate about the delay became the most discussed topic, and even overwhelmed the heat of the game itself.
At that time, due to the epidemic, the Chinese team RNG was unable to go to Busan, South Korea to compete, so all RNG related events were switched to online. In order to ensure the fairness of the competition, the official statement in advance would control the delay of all teams to about 35ms.
Unexpectedly, after RNG won three games, the official suddenly canceled the game result and asked for a rematch on the grounds that the opponent’s delay was higher than RNG. This move caused dissatisfaction among many fans, and in a subsequent game, someone found that the delay of the offline team was 22ms, which was far lower than the official value, and the network conditions were obviously not good for RNG. It is even more unfavorable, so in the eyes of the audience, the decision to request a rematch is even more unreasonable, which has also caused many doubts about the organizers.
Regardless of the official follow-up operations for the time being, the announcement of the unification of the team’s delay before the start of the game is indeed a helpless move to balance the differences in the offline and online network environments.
Everyone knows that there is a physical distance of more than 800 kilometers between the servers in Shanghai and South Korea. This distance cannot be shortened by any means. Therefore, it is inevitable that there will be a higher-than-normal delay in RNG games.
In professional games, any slight network fluctuations may become the key to determining the outcome, just like Faker once said that as long as the network ping value is about 5ms higher than usual, he can feel the difference.
When the delay cannot be reduced from the physical level, it is naturally a last resort to bring the network conditions of all teams to a uniform level. Although it affects the players to a certain extent, it at least guarantees a relative Fair, but the premise is that there will be no subsequent series of emergencies.
From this example, we can see that due to the irreducible physical distance, it is almost impossible for players scattered all over the world to maintain a smooth network environment forever.
Data transmission will always be limited by the physical distance of the server
However, there is no absolute in everything. With the changes of the times and technology, there are always developers who can find another way and figure out some creative “black technology”. Regarding this point, the “rollback code technology” that can predict the opponent’s instructions in advance in fighting games is a typical example.
For fighting games that use “frames” as the calculation unit (equivalent to 1/60th of a second) and build tactics based on this, the impact of network delay will be maximized.
To give a simple example, suppose a character’s light punch is 8 frames, and the opponent’s character is 9 frames, which means that if both parties press the light punch button at the same time, the one who is attacked must be the start time However, assuming that there are network fluctuations at this time, even if it is only a 20ms delay, it may cause the two sides to switch between offense and defense. influences.
Therefore, for a long time, the online experience of fighting games was difficult to describe, until Cannon Brothers, the founders of EVO, the world’s largest fighting game event, brought a mechanism called “rollback code”. Improved the poor online environment of fighting games.
Although fighting games have strict requirements on the “frame number” of moves, from another perspective, assuming a character has played a move with an animation length of 10 frames, it means that in the next 10 frames, the player input Other commands will be invalid, so even if the network is disconnected at this time, it will not affect the progress of the game.
And it is this certainty that buys time for the “rollback code”. When encountering network fluctuations and the server fails to receive the player’s input, the system will “cut first and play later” and directly give the character a predicted command. If the prediction is found to be correct after the network returns to normal, it will follow the trend and play the subsequent attack animation. Everyone is happy.
But if the prediction fails, the game will go back to the previous few frames for input detection. After getting the correct command, it will re-render the attack animation at the current moment. Although this will cause a little fragmentation of the screen, it ensures that the battle will be correct. And compared to the player’s input delay, the dynamic changes in just a few frames will be obviously smoother.
However, although this kind of behavior is called “prediction”, it is not the type you imagine that relies on intelligent AI to analyze the opponent’s operations. Maintain previous operations”.
For another example, assume that in a professional arena, the player changes the direction of movement 5 times within one second, and at 60 frames per second, the system must receive only 5 frames of information from the server within this second (change The 5 frames in the direction), and the remaining 55 frames only need to be assumed to be the same as the previous frame. Relying on this operating principle, the game’s dependence on the network can be minimized. Therefore, with such a “rollback code”, It makes it possible to connect fighting games smoothly across regions.
Of course, there are many factors that cause game delays. Given the different types of games and their particularities, the methods that are effective in certain types of games may not be applicable to other games. Just like “rollback code” although it shines in fighting games, if it is switched to an FPS game with more player operation options and more complex screens per unit time, the performance may not be good.
If you want to better solve the delay problem, you must prescribe the right medicine. In addition to network reasons in FPS games, system delay is also an important factor affecting the game experience.
In a first-person shooter game, from discovering the enemy, clicking the mouse, to the character in the game pulling the trigger, and the bullet hitting the enemy, a series of calculations on the local device are actually required. Judging from the fact that professional players began to pursue monitors with higher refresh rates and faster mouse and keyboard responses, the system delay of the device itself has also been valued by more players.
When it comes to the solution to system delay, the NVIDIA Reflex technology developed by NVIDIA is undoubtedly one of the outstanding ones.
Many people often have this kind of experience when playing FPS games – they have found the enemy and pressed the mouse, but the bullets are always “slow”, making themselves inexplicably a “human body stroke master”.
This situation may be caused by “system delay”. Although the enemy has already appeared in the game, from the moment the enemy appears in the scene, the instructions need to be processed by the CPU in turn and submitted to the GPU to render the picture. Waiting for this After the series work is complete, it can be fed back to the display and finally seen by the player.
To put it simply, before the enemy appears on the screen, your computer needs to spend a certain amount of time processing information, rendering the frame and finally presenting it on the monitor, but during this time, the enemy is already in front of you and ready to appear. may attack you.
Although this period of time is calculated in “milliseconds”, in the environment where milliseconds count in the professional arena, any delay may affect the victory of the game.
The NVIDIA Reflex technology can keep the CPU and GPU in sync, changing the previous process of queuing up for each frame of the picture to wait for the CPU and GPU to render, thereby dynamically reducing the rendering queue to achieve the effect of reducing latency.
This technology is installed in NVIDIA 900 series and above graphics cards. Under the tests of various shooting games, such as “Apex Heroes”, “Fortress Night” and “Rainbow Six: Siege”, it can significantly reduce the system performance by nearly half. Latency, if used with a monitor with a refresh rate of 360Hz, the system delay can even be reduced to 12ms.
NVIDIA Reflex needs the simultaneous support of game manufacturers, and since the announcement of this technology, more than 50 released games have provided support for it. In addition to the popular FPS games mentioned above, such as “DOTA2″ ” and the recently released “Fearless Contract” have successively supported this technology. As time goes by, I believe that the ecology built by NVIDIA will continue to grow.
In addition to these hardcore e-sports games, NVIDIA Reflex and the newly released NVIDIA DLSS 3 technology have also jointly provided an experience breakthrough for a wider range of game works. DLSS
3 Based on DLSS super-resolution technology, combined with frame generation technology to generate new frames, it greatly improves graphics performance while maintaining excellent image quality and response speed. Works such as the RTX version of “Portal” and the next-generation upgraded version of “The Witcher 3” have all added support for DLSS
3 support.
At this year’s CES exhibition, NVIDIA officially announced two G-SYNC gaming monitors that support 1440p 360Hz. According to the official data test, players can get higher image protection under the ultra-high frame rate 1440p screen. Reality and motion clarity to better identify and target enemies. in GeForce
With the powerful performance of the RTX 40 series GPU, 1440P 360Hz, a goal of high resolution + high refresh rate that seemed unattainable in the past, has been achieved in e-sports games.
How much can 1440p improve? Last year, scientists at the NVIDIA Esports Research Lab compared the aiming performance of the game on small targets on 1080p 25-inch and 1440p 27-inch displays. The final results showed that the aiming performance under 1440p can be improved by about 3%.
This 3% is negligible for ordinary players, but for professional players who are fighting for every centimeter, any slight improvement may determine the outcome of a game, so update the monitor with ultra-high resolution and refresh rate , and perhaps it will also be the trend of e-sports professionals in the future.
In addition to effectively reducing system latency, G-SYNC monitors also have NVIDIA G-SYNC Gaming Mode with adjustable saturation and support for full NVIDIA Reflex
Analyzer, players can measure end-to-end system latency when using Reflex mouse and GeForce GPU. For professional players, this is undoubtedly the best tool to test the computer’s latency to different devices.
Whether it is network or system delay, although the current human technology can only minimize their impact on the game, but cannot completely eliminate it, it is like two “infinitely close, but never intersecting” function curves in mathematics Similarly, it represents people’s eternal pursuit of technological limits, and it is this persistence that allows players to experience new games with gorgeous graphics and excellent expressiveness.
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