Pong Without Ping: Implications Of Lag And Latency In Videogame Development

The PS3 Skyrim Lag

In November 2011, Bethesda Softworks released the fifth instalment of its Elder Scrolls role playing videogame series. Skyrim launched to universal critical acclaim, obtaining a Metacritic score of between 92-96/100 depending on format. Famitsu, considered the most widely read and respected videogame magazine in Japan, gave Skyrim a perfect score, making it the first western video game to receive a 40/40 rating. A month after launch, it had sold over 7.9 million copies1.

To call the game ambitious would be an understatement. Bethesda employed over seventy actors (including the talents of Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow and Joan Allen) to record the voices of non-player characters in the game,with the total number of lines recorded being over 60,000. It is estimated that to complete all of Skyrim's 250 or so quests and see its 300+ points of interest would take the average gamer around 250-300 hours.

However, it didn't take long for reports to emerge of PS3 players, who had invested a considerable amount of time into the game, experiencing significant reduction in graphical frame rates (often to zero refreshes per second) and poor controller responses. Bethesda released a patch to fix this issue in December and whilst this seemed to improve the overall frame rate, the graphical lags for gamers who had saved their progress in the game at the 60 hour mark or beyond were still evident. Word quickly spread on the internet that, to all intents and purposes, the game was unplayable for experienced players who played the game a lot: in other words, the target audience.

At the time of writing, further patches have been promised which may solve the problem. With no official word from Bethesda, commentators across the internet have been speculating what could have caused the latency issues, with many pointing to the way the game may interact with the internal architecture of the PS3 itself.

In the Skyrim game world, actions have consequences - if the player's character interacts with any other characters, objects or elements, the game stores the outcome so that a plundered treasure chest doesn't magically refill or a burning house suddenly reappear without so much as a scorch mark. All this information needs to be stored in memory and - like a giant database - may require greater processing the longer the game goes on. Coupled with this is the fact that unlike the Xbox 360, the PS3's memory architecture is split and the footprint of its operating system is comparatively large (even though it does not currently use much of what has been assigned to it), leading to a low bandwidth between its processor and its memory. Precise database management (including organising what, if anything, can be deleted or reused once interacted with) for a huge save file would, so the theory goes, have clear implications on the way the game performs, given the bottleneck between CPU and VRAM. It is perhaps simply, as Tom Morgan of Eurogamer.net put it, "an unbounded game running on [a] space-constricted system."

Online latency

Latency is not just confined to the delay experienced in an internal hardware system; more usually, it refers to delays experienced in online gaming due to connection speeds and geographical factors. Essentially, latency (or "ping time") is the time taken for data of a set size (a "data packet") to cross from the sender to the receiver and is measured by the time taken for a data packet to be sent to its destination and a response to be received (a "round-trip").

Latency is present in any transmission of data, whether the distance involved is a few centimetres (between components of a computer), a few metres (between computers in the same room) or thousands of miles (over the internet). The causes of latency can be grouped into three broad categories:

Propagation latency

This is the time it takes for a signal to travel from one end of a communication link to the other. There are two factors that determine...

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