Does downloading things take much from your gaming power?

I searched on google for this and couldn't find anything... Any detailed info on this? "no, or yes" is not really what I'm looking for.

Anyway, thanks.

 

Well if you think about it, downloading will use cpu I'm guessing but wont use the gpu. In this case, if your cpu isnt able to keep up due to multi-tasking, it might lag. Also, downloading is pretty much writing on your hard drive, so if your game is loading, that will probably slow down.

 

Also for online games, downloading might possibly have an effect on your ping (maybe).

 

I know downloading while playing online games will have an effect. It's HUGE actually. I meant offline games.

 

Depends on the game and on your system. I know steam will pause a download if I try to play (even non steam games) when downloading. I just do my downloading over night.

 

If it's a larger file, then it will mostly affect the HD speed due to the writing, so if you have a game that is constantly loading and saving, those will be reduced. But actual FPS shouldn't differ too much (unless you're using a download client, such as VUZE that has an interface and demands a bit of CPU and RAM for itself)

 

Games in general do not need much bandwidth, if you can limit upload and download speeds to 50-75% of the maximum games will usually work just fine.

 

And downloading to hard drive is not CPU intensive. It caches to RAM and then to hard drive in chunks so for an offline game especially it will not make any difference at least for a modern PC (i.e. last couple of years).

 

I got enough bandwidth to do both gaming and downloading whatever games i want of GoG, Steam or Origin.
I just set my router to reserve bandwidth if it detects any games i have added.

 

average case for offline games? no significant difference.

with QoS manipulation (at the router level) you could also eliminate the issue for online games. Depending on the aggressiveness of your download, downloading can essentially bring any network to a halt by using 100% of the network's resources (ie. BitTorrent).

Your normal downloads tend to be less intensive, but could still ruin an online game. Downloading files from the internet in general is not an intensive process and won't affect games from a local computational power perspective.

 

Ok good information to know. Thanks everyone.

 

It's mostly the upload you need to worry about, not download. So you should probably pause your torrents while you're gaming (multiplayer only), but other than that I wouldn't worry too much.

 

Mostly? No. In the past where laptops were mainly single core machines, and some crazy power users had RAID 0 setups and GigE PCMCIA cards? Maybe then...

 

Does this reduce fps for large open world games that need to load cells frequently?

 

As said previously, downloading affects the bandwidth available for online games. The amount of CPU it takes is laughable. Unless you are playing a very CPU intensive game, you won't notice a thing at all, and even in a CPU intensive game, you won't notice the difference in all probability. Downloading had no effect what so ever on civ5 when my G73 had a 720qm.

With your setup, i doubt you will notice anything, no game is ever gonna use up all your RAM, your CPU is still plenty fast and you're running off SSDs. I won't comment on the RAID 0 though.

 

I might not be sober, nevermind this post.

 

1. CPU-wise, not really. Most of the network processing stuff is handled by your network chip rather than your CPU.
2. However, it might affect it some what if you are downloading huge files on to the same hard disk your game is installed on and if you are using physical hard drivers. Though it's kind of rare, it only makes my game lag when i'm downloading huge files at like 15 mb per second on fibre.

 

It depends on the implementation of the game. In general, it should not be an issue. If the designer of the game was counting on the hard drive to stream content constantly and pushed the limits of the hard drive, then it's possible it could cause an issue.

In general, that isn't the case. Most games (including open world games) load all needed assets into memory. Even if they stream contents dynamically from the hard drive, they aren't doing it constantly or at least aren't depending on it for performance. Hard drive performance is very low across the board, and also relatively volatile, compared to everything else in your computer, so most developers (all good developers) choose not to depend on hard drive performance by loading all needed assets into memory in advance (loading screen) and/or using other tactics, such as dynamically loading (streaming) from the hard drive, but well in advance of needing that streamed data.