Does Videocard affect ping?

[Everlast25]

I have a p3 850 with 256 mb of ram and a tnt2 diamond ultra--I love unreal tournament and am wondering if getting a new videocard will help keep my ping from fluctuating during busy times onscreen. I currently get about 60 fps online and I have vrizon dsl 640/90. My ping to good servers is about 65-70 but it jumps to 250 or so during heavy fighting sequences...will a New videocard help this or is it all about the connection? Does my upload spped hurt me here? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
D

[CoolJ]

Its all about your cable speed my friend, nothing to do with your video card.

By the way, how do you check fps in UT?

[reverse]

By the way, how do you check fps in UT?

Select TimeDemo

[YeOldeStonecat]

Actually it does, and can, depending on the game...

Regarding the ping debates, actually many of us hardcore gamers found and proved back in the Quake2 days that yes your video does impact your pings. This was back when the Voodoo2 cards were just coming out, and high framerates were starting to become common. Many of us with fast machines found we were getting high packet loss, and higher pings, as soon as swapped a new fast vid card in. We found on Quake2 performance sites that for dial up, you wanted to have a maxfps line in your games autoexec.cfg file, I think the magic number was 37, but that varied on the quality of your connection. If you left your video card run uncapped, and you ran the built in NETSTAT utility, you'd find a ton of packet loss and higher pings.

How so? With Quake2, it was a turn to more heavily client based games, instead of Quake1s server based. With client based games, each screen demands updates from the server. The more FPS you're pushing, the more updates from the server you're asking, hence the larger demand on your bandwidth. Start asking for more than what your bandwidth can handle, your packet loss and pings go up.

You could sit there and do this over and over, changing your FPS, while running netstat, and watch the difference like night and day.

That was with Quake2, I'm sure it's changed a bit for new games, but I'm sure some of it still has to be true, just to a lesser effect on todays games due to all different and better netcode, client prediction, etc.

[CoolJ]

Cool, Thanks for the info!

[Everlast25]

Thanks for the info guys I appreciate the responses...I am looking into a ati radeon 64mb...price is right :)

[YeOldeStonecat]

Im' so so on ATI cards, have a Radeon in my desk drawer, used as a backup for one of my NT 4 servers that I sometimes setup dual boot with 98.

I'll be honest, I far prefer GeForce cards for gaming. Compatibility! And I have them all to compare each other to. GeForce 2 Ultra 64 or higher, nothing can touch it.