Kadin Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 I'm toying with the idea of changing internet services and I really only play this game along with watching stuff like Netflix. I'm wondering if anyone has looked into what this game uses on a pretty consistent basis. I need to see if I can drop my speeds a bit and still do both of the above. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GopherLuV Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 Almost any service should be fine... having 10mbps download should cover the game, though it won't allow for much more traffic... My home ISP runs about 25-30 mbps and I have my game as well as usually 2 devices streaming (usually netflix on both, sometimes hulu or xfinity streams, all HD stream..) As for upload speeds, if you see more than 2-2.5 mbps you have great service.. my home runs about 2, on my good internet I hit 60mbps cap download and 12mbps upload cap.. The one thing you need to make sure of is no data caps, not rate caps but overall caps, i've seen and heard of many ISPs limiting to say 300GB a month.. which is like 10 hours worth of HD netflix streams... But so long as you have a nice basic ISP package of 10mbps download you should be fine for the game, though as I said you won't be able to use multiple devices at the same time... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MadDutchman Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 I run on 8Mbps down, < 0.5Mbps up and it runs fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heat-Wave Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 I just did... It never broke 1 megabit per second (I had Windows 8 Task Manager open and on top watching the bar graph for spikes), and frankly most of the time it was at dial up speed... I entered a warzone and fought for 14 minutes (since just standing around fleet doesn't mean much). In those 14 minutes, my total data transfer to and from my computer was 6.4 megabytes total (nothing else is running in the background right now, but that is the total for the computer, the game might be ever so slightly less). That averages out to about 8k per second. A dial up modem could handle it, if it were actually that even... the spikes in transfer would be an issue, but this game should be totally playable on a 1.5 meg DSL connection. This is just one data point, doing one thing, a warzone (it was an 8v8 map and I was engaged in combat most of the time). Different times of day and different activities are different I'm sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heat-Wave Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 Almost any service should be fine... having 10mbps download should cover the game, though it won't allow for much more traffic... My home ISP runs about 25-30 mbps and I have my game as well as usually 2 devices streaming (usually netflix on both, sometimes hulu or xfinity streams, all HD stream..) As for upload speeds, if you see more than 2-2.5 mbps you have great service.. my home runs about 2, on my good internet I hit 60mbps cap download and 12mbps upload cap.. The one thing you need to make sure of is no data caps, not rate caps but overall caps, i've seen and heard of many ISPs limiting to say 300GB a month.. which is like 10 hours worth of HD netflix streams... But so long as you have a nice basic ISP package of 10mbps download you should be fine for the game, though as I said you won't be able to use multiple devices at the same time... At the data rate the game used in the 14 min warzone that I played... if you did that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 30 days... you'd use 20GB of data... If it weren't for the spikes in data that I saw, the game would be playable on dialup. Far more data was received than sent. The single biggest spike was when loading into the WZ, probably sending me all the details on the other 15 players (gear, names, etc.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GopherLuV Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 At the data rate the game used in the 14 min warzone that I played... if you did that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 30 days... you'd use 20GB of data... If it weren't for the spikes in data that I saw, the game would be playable on dialup. Far more data was received than sent. The single biggest spike was when loading into the WZ, probably sending me all the details on the other 15 players (gear, names, etc.) While this may be true, and i'm not expert in this ****, but I would not suggest playing on a connection that runs like 3mbps... honestly it's semi difficult to find that slow of speed unless you go to DSL, which has issues with stability over time... It may not use a whole lot of data but, like i said, with a ~25 mbps connection and two netflix streams going, I get small lag spikes every so often. This is mostly due to the ISP having issues anyways... Another factor would be wired vs wireless connections.. a wireless connection has issues just like a DSL would, interference and stuff.. If you wanna be sure to have a good experience, get a nice cheap 10mbps cable connection (again upload speed really isnt anything to be concerned with unless uploading massive files out of game...) and run it wired if possible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kadin Posted February 17, 2015 Author Share Posted February 17, 2015 (edited) I just did... It never broke 1 megabit per second (I had Windows 8 Task Manager open and on top watching the bar graph for spikes), and frankly most of the time it was at dial up speed... I entered a warzone and fought for 14 minutes (since just standing around fleet doesn't mean much). In those 14 minutes, my total data transfer to and from my computer was 6.4 megabytes total (nothing else is running in the background right now, but that is the total for the computer, the game might be ever so slightly less). That averages out to about 8k per second. A dial up modem could handle it, if it were actually that even... the spikes in transfer would be an issue, but this game should be totally playable on a 1.5 meg DSL connection. This is just one data point, doing one thing, a warzone (it was an 8v8 map and I was engaged in combat most of the time). Different times of day and different activities are different I'm sure. Thank you very much. That's exactly the kind of detail I'm looking for. Oh and the connection I'm looking at would be 16Mbit dn and 3Mbit up. But I'm hoping that playing the game and streaming HD via Netflix would be doable simultaneously. Edited February 17, 2015 by Kadin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Orizuru Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 Here is a link that shows the bandwidth recommendation for Netflix. Sadly though, they don't specify if this is for a single device streaming or for a home with multiple devices streaming simultaneously. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306 Gaming online while streaming will require a slight bump up from what they recommend here. You shouldn't need more than 1 mbps of additional bandwidth for online gaming. The real negative you will find with decreasing your bandwidth at home is when you need to download large patches for games or new games from things like Steam. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kadin Posted February 17, 2015 Author Share Posted February 17, 2015 Here is a link that shows the bandwidth recommendation for Netflix. Sadly though, they don't specify if this is for a single device streaming or for a home with multiple devices streaming simultaneously. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306 Gaming online while streaming will require a slight bump up from what they recommend here. You shouldn't need more than 1 mbps of additional bandwidth for online gaming. The real negative you will find with decreasing your bandwidth at home is when you need to download large patches for games or new games from things like Steam. Thanks! So it looks like based on that page and what everyone above said, I should be good. I don't plan to stream Ultra HD, just the normal and 720p at that. Thanks for the help everyone, very much appreciated! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lpope Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 I run on cellular, so I was very concerned with data usage until I got a 30GB / month plan. Just doing solo stuff on planets is typically somewhere between 10 - 20MB / hour. Doing a 16m OPS is typically around 100MB / hour. I'm not sure what GSF or PvP does. I never really measured it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heat-Wave Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 Thank you very much. That's exactly the kind of detail I'm looking for. Oh and the connection I'm looking at would be 16Mbit dn and 3Mbit up. But I'm hoping that playing the game and streaming HD via Netflix would be doable simultaneously. You bet... assuming that the 16 megabit connection is accurate and actually gives you that speed, it would be enough to watch 3 HD streams and play SWTOR at the same time. Each HD netflix steam uses "up to" 5 megabits of bandwith. It is the "up to" that is worth considering, a lot of their content is compressed more than that, it is the prime and marquee titles that get the best data rates of course. I used to use Netflix, but switched to Amazon Instant Video as my primary TV source since I have the option to buy current shows with them, which Netflix didn't offer (have no idea if they do now or not). Need to get my Shark Tank fix! (and we cut cable awhile ago) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MillionsKNives Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 I run on cellular, so I was very concerned with data usage until I got a 30GB / month plan. Just doing solo stuff on planets is typically somewhere between 10 - 20MB / hour. Doing a 16m OPS is typically around 100MB / hour. I'm not sure what GSF or PvP does. I never really measured it. That looks about right to me. I've played SWTOR tethered to my phone while on long bus trips before, and I remember it only coming out to a handful of MB per hour's usage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kadin Posted February 17, 2015 Author Share Posted February 17, 2015 You bet... assuming that the 16 megabit connection is accurate and actually gives you that speed, it would be enough to watch 3 HD streams and play SWTOR at the same time. Each HD netflix steam uses "up to" 5 megabits of bandwith. It is the "up to" that is worth considering, a lot of their content is compressed more than that, it is the prime and marquee titles that get the best data rates of course. I used to use Netflix, but switched to Amazon Instant Video as my primary TV source since I have the option to buy current shows with them, which Netflix didn't offer (have no idea if they do now or not). Need to get my Shark Tank fix! (and we cut cable awhile ago) Yeah that's pretty much what I'm doing right now, or plan to. I'm tired of the crazy high cable rates we're paying and it's time to offload that for over the air digital from my local providers and Netflix along with maybe Hulu. Either way, as long as TOR is still fully playable, I'm happy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RiVaN_ Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 I played over a cell phone connection for a week last summer. My plan at the time was 4gb. 4 days of my "normal" play time (7pm-11pm) only used about 1gb of data. I was using TeamSpeak while gaming and was using e-mail and my wife shares the data with me. So altogether we used 1.5gb in a week with me gaming over my cell data plan and doing all of our "normal day to day stuff." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heat-Wave Posted February 17, 2015 Share Posted February 17, 2015 Lots of bandwith is wonderful, but it really does seem that it is needed only for a few things... Streaming video of course is the big one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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