Connection speeds and online gaming

How important are connection speeds for online gaming? I'm looking for some of your opinions because I like to play all types of games including competitive shooters and fighting games to RPG's and single player story's. When I do play competitive shooter and fighting games I feel as if I need a very good connection in order to do well. This might just be me thinking too much about it but it eventually turns into "I won't play unless I have a great connection." I even bought a 50 ft Ethernet cable just to have a wired connection. What do you guys think?

Connection speed (bandwidth) isn't actually that important at all, games use very, very little bandwidth. What is important is latency, it's one of the reasons people notice an improvement on wired ethernet connections over wireless networking. Using wireless adds extra steps for error detection and has a much higher frequency for things like dropped packets that'll all add to the latency of the connection.

But when that latency is too high online games are nigh on unplayable with characters seemingly warping around all over the place, dropped connections become more frequent too. Though the largest factors for latency will always be your distance from the server you're connecting to, it's just usually outside your control on consoles.

Hmm, it all depends , is it mp games like CoD, BF, CSgo, wow and other where reaction and speed plays a role then latency is very very important. Is it games like Civ, CK, Hearthstone than not so much.

So does it matter if you have a 50/50 or 100/100 not so much as mentioned the key is your ping, do you have 60 or 600.

Interesting,so how many Mbps would be ideal for the least amount of latency when playing a game like COD?

Its hard to say but i would not go below 5-10 for a game like CoD , not because you wouldn't be able to do with lower but just to be sure, because most isp's don't actually deliver the max.

But in the end what matters is the connection to the CoD server , so always look for the lowest ping.

@Jacanuk said:

@SolidIngram said:

Interesting,so how many Mbps would be ideal for the least amount of latency when playing a game like COD?

Its hard to say but i would not go below 5-10 for a game like CoD , not because you wouldn't be able to do with lower but just to be sure, because most isp's don't actually deliver the max.

But in the end what matters is the connection to the CoD server , so always look for the lowest ping.

Ok thanks appreciate the advice.