Are you experiencing low FPS while playing games, or are simply wondering if your frame rate is affected by your internet speed?
The truth is, there is a lot that goes into how smoothly your game will play, and if even one area is experiencing issues, it can have drastic affects.
So, in this article we’ll go over how your internet speed affects your FPS, and what you can do to improve it!
Does Your Internet Speed Affect Your FPS?
No. Generally speaking, your internet connection does not have any affect on your total FPS. Instead, your FPS is determined by the speed of the hardware within your computer, such as your GPU and in some cases, your CPU as well.
Where internet speed can have an affect is when it comes to online gaming – specifically the ping or latency that you experience while playing online.
With a poor internet connection, you may experience lag spikes or jumps that occur sporadically.
I’ll talk more about how different factors work together (and the true effect they have on your game) in just a moment. Knowing this information is key to improving your game’s performance, so keep reading!
Different Measurements Affect your Gameplay Differently
Did you know that things like your internet speed, your computer’s graphics card, and even your hard drive speed can all affect your game differently?
It all comes down to how your computer is utilizing each of these things, and the role they play within your game.
Let’s look over different types of lagging and stuttering now, so you can see how different factors affect each one of them.
1. Lag / Ping
When playing online, one of the most frequent (and annoying) issues you’ll experience is lag, which is caused by a high ping.
When you think about internet speed affecting your gameplay, this is typically what you’re thinking of.
Your total ping (otherwise known as latency) is the time it takes for an action you take to actually reach the game’s server, and be reflected to other players.
Likewise, when someone else does something in an online game, there is a brief period of time before its reflected to your screen as well.
Having a low ping means that when you do something within a game, it is actually processed by the game’s server quickly. If you have a high ping for example, someone may appear to be there, but by the time you can start aiming at them for example, they are actually already gone.
Therefore, having a low ping is especially important in competitive FPS games, where you need to be able to make split-second decisions, or engage in one-on-one fights as fast as possible.
Hence, using high-ping internet providers like Starlink may be less than ideal.
2. FPS
FPS – or frames per second, is the number of frames rendered on your screen every second.
The higher your frame rate, the smoother your gameplay will look. While internet speed may affect lag (causing your game to freeze or stutter), it does not generally affect FPS.
Instead, your frames per second are affected most by your computer’s internal hardware – such as your graphics card, or your computer’s CPU.
Remember, all of the game’s textures, graphics and files are already downloaded to your computer before you begin a match, which allows online gaming to actually use very little data, relatively speaking.
In order for all of those graphics to render in real time however, your computer’s graphics card and CPU have to work hard to make it happen.
If they are not powerful enough to render everything fast enough, this may cause FPS to dip.
So, how can you handle this?
The easiest way to is to turn down your graphics settings within the game. Some settings are computationally difficult for your graphics card to handle, but do not have that big of an effect on your overall experience.
Likewise, make sure no other programs are using too much of your GPU or CPU in the background. If they are, consider closing these until your gaming session is finished.
3. Loading Times
Finally, let’s look at loading times.
Loading times – such as loading up a new level, or going to a new area in a game, aren’t usually affected by your GPU, CPU, nor internet speed.
Instead, the most common cause of high loading times is a slow hard drive.
New areas of a game require a large number of files to be loaded into memory. The biggest bottleneck of this is usually your hard drive’s speed. Of course, once everything is loaded, the hard drive speed isn’t quite as important of a factor anymore.
So, if you play games with long loading times, you may consider purchasing a faster hard drive – or ideally, upgrading to a solid state drive.
Solid state drives read up to 10x faster than hard drives, so it can make a huge difference!
Conclusion
Although your internet can affect the amount you lag within an online game – as well as the total latency between your computer and the server, it does not generally affect your frames-per-second.
Instead, your FPS is affected most by the internal hardware within your system, such as your CPU and graphics card. By upgrading your hardware or lowering your graphics settings within your game, you should experience an increase in FPS.
I hope that you’ve found this article helpful, and that it’s answered all of your questions. If you have any other questions about improving your FPS – or how internet speed affects gameplay, please ask them using the comment form below.
Thanks for reading, and wishing you the best!
– James McAllister