As an online gamer, one of the aspects of computing that is crucial to online gaming is your internet connection. With fast-paced games like Call of Duty or first-person shooter games like Overwatch that hold world-wide competitive competitions or if you’re streaming Twitch videos, it’s vital for gamers to have a fast working internet connection. Just a few milliseconds can mean the difference between killing and being killed. According to DigitalSpy, for those gamers focused on getting the best download speeds, Virgin Media is going to cater to this community of online gamers with their “VIVID 200 Gamer,” an optional upgrade for its VIVID 200 tariff. The upgrade will cost you roughly an extra £5 per month, that’s about $6.5 US dollars.
The increase in speed will raise your gamer’s download Mbps to 200 and will increase upload speeds from 12 Mbps to 20 Mbps. For those who use Twitch or YouTube Gaming, Vivid 200 should enhance streaming content.
Virgin Media also says that online gamers should expect lower pings and latency, which can help give them that competitive edge over others who may have a more laggy connection. They also confirm with Recombu that there will be no download cap; so for those gamers streaming and watching other people stream, you can watch as much content as you want. And as for traffic management, currently, upload speeds are restricted by 50 percent for an hour for anything over 2.25GB. That’s about 90 minutes of Twitch streaming at its highest 3.5 Mbps quality setting (not too great). However, Vivid 200 Gamer is calming to remove traffic management so your connection will be faster for a longer duration of time. Virgin’s Gregor McNeil said
We understand the frustrations when it comes to lag, disconnects and bandwidth issues, so right from the start we wanted to design a tier that builds on our superior connectivity to give gamers and streamers what they need. With the fastest speeds and reliable connectivity, this is broadband built for gamers.
On paper, the Vivid 200 Gamer sounds like it’ll be much better for upload and download tasks than its predecessor, but it’s still unclear at this point since it just came out today. Virgin Media hopes to gather more gamers by sponsoring this year’s EGX gaming festival this month.