[Demiurge]

Latency is more important than reliability for online gaming because the world state instantly gets stale. Instead of retransmit you want latest snapshot. I'd be curious to find out in what online games that is not the case.

[dogma1138]

Latency isn’t an issue today what so ever, it’s not like UDP also has a magical lower latency it had in the past because of smaller packets and slower computers but today?

Online games work today with fixed ticks and polling usually at half of full frame rate which means that the server updates and polls the client 30 or 60 times a second or any other even multiplier of the expected synced frame rate.

[Matheus28]

>This fixed and predictable rate pretty much means that UDP is near pointless and games that still don’t have a predictable tick rate and use UDP tend to be a rubber banding lag fest.

You're wrong. Head of line blocking is a real thing that happens very often in TCP.

Edit: parent poster removed that part of the comment between me reading and submitting a reply

[vvanders]

Nope, sorry but you're completely wrong on this. UDP is better because head of line blocking will causes large delays during packet loss.

Source: I used to write networking stacks for realtime games.

[bschwindHN]

I'm calling bullshit. TCP has to retransmit lost packets whereas UDP can keep on going without waiting for transmission. Ephemeral data like controller input or past game states can be ignored because that time has passed, while TCP is still trying its best to get the packets there in order and reliably.

Latency is still absolutely an issue. I play games from Japan with my friends in the states and I often have a ping of 140 ms or so. That is latency, and properly implemented games (Rocket League, for example) will deal with it using UDP among other techniques.

Slower paced games can still use TCP though because latency issues are less sensitive.