High ping with LAN..need advice

When my friend and I play a game of Unreal Tournament, I noticed something. My computer has a Geforce 2 MMX64MB vid card, a fairly decent one. He has a Nvidia vanta basic card that came with his comp, an 8 meg card if I remember correctly. Now since I have a faster computer, I use that as the server. When he connects, you can hit F1 to see the PING. His fluctuates around 50 to 175. Mine is zero. He says it is kinda of choppy at times when they are lots of bots on the screen. I thought with a network you get zero ping and lag. Does anyone have an idea why this could be happening? The only major differences in my comp versus my friends is that I have a good vid card and 128 megs of RAM versus his generic vid card and he has 64 megs of RAM(which is at least the minimun requirement for the game.) Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Who ever told you there was never a lag on a LAN? It is dependant on the NIC, your cabling, the protocols installed. There is no way your ping times can be at zero because it will always take some time to get a response. I bet his machine has a smaller processor too which would cause his game to look choppy.

 

50 to 175 is really not bad. You get zero because you are the server. My guess for his lag would be the low amount of RAM in his machine and also the slower video card. He should consider an upgrade if you really want to smooth this out. RAM has went up some but, is still dirt cheap compared to last year. I usually order from www.crucial.com
Good memory and good prices, shipping has always been on time.

Good Luck

 

You should be able to do better than that, see this page for some info
http://www.planetunreal.com/utguide/lan.shtml

When my son and I play guake3 on lan there is no lag unless something on the server is running and causes it.

Make sure you shut everything else down on the server

I would assume it is a network setting on one of the two machines causing the lag

 

We both have the same network cards, Link sys 100TX Fast ethernet adpater(LNE 100TXv4). The computer he uses is a emachines 550 megaherzt, as mine is custom built AMD athalon 1 Gig processor. I used to use that emachines before back in the day but then it had 128 megs of RAM and a ATI Rage 32MB vid card...i didnt get no lag in Unreal, so I assuming its the 64 RAM and the poor vid. card causing the lag for him, right? Quake 2 doesnt lag for him though nor does Alien versu Predator. I am still new learning about all this lag stuff. Am I right with my assumptions?

 

Just a thought, before you spend any money, do the machines have the same type of ram? If so can you pull 64 megs and try it in his machine to see if it solves the problem. If he has pc100 and you are using pc133 you should still be able to swap it out to test. The game minimum is 64 but 128 is recommended.

SeeYa