Impulse: Why speed matters

Published on October 8, 2009 By Draginol In Personal Computing

Someday, someone is going to do a round up of digital distribution platforms and get around to comparing one very important feature: How FAST they download.

That’s one of Impulse’s biggest advantages. It’s got crazy fast download speeds whether you’re in North America or Australia or Germany or wherever.

Here’s a little video I took from my relatively humble home Comcast cable setup.

Comments (Page 2)

zakai1369

on Oct 08, 2009

30KB/sec.

... they still make dialup?

Jafo

on Oct 09, 2009

I use impulse too. I am in the process of downing loading two games CoH and each one has 8GB and ave 30KB/sec. I started two days ago and at this rate it will be two more days so a total of 96 hours (4 days) at 1.04167% an hour.

My first ISP was [eventually] a 56k dialup which was unlimited...as long as you paid the rate....$2 per hour.

That DL would cost $192 ....and thus be totally impractical.

Biggest DL I ever did on that dialup was SP1 of XP ...about 80 meg.

Saint Mina

on Oct 09, 2009

I guess it is Dail up PPPoE on INET WAN(PPP/SLIP) Interface.

Here is the results of http://speedtest.net/ from where I live.

Ping: 136ms

Download Speed: .19 mb/s

Upload Speed: .16 mb/s

Spooky__

on Oct 09, 2009

Yep, that's one of the things I like in Impulse, it's always maxing out my download speed . Unlike Steam.

Tridus

on Oct 09, 2009

Netriak

reply 5

What I primarily notice with Impulse is how glacial patch downloads are in comparison to a full game archive. When I install a game from scratch I get a steady 10 Megabytes per second, allowing me to download a big game in a couple of minutes, which is as it should be.

However, whenever a patch is released, the download speed is about 200 KB/sec, a mere 2% of the full game download speed. While I understand the reason for this behaviour, only the full game archives are mirrored to the fast servers, it does result in the rather odd effect that if a patch is large, it is faster to reinstall the game than to patch it. Now, most patches are not that large, so it generally isn't a problem, but it still one of the less impressive parts of the Impulse download experience.

Really? Are you sure its not just downloading lots of small files for the patch instead of one huge file for the game install?

Due to transfer startup times, a set of small files can appear MUCH slower then a single big one.

Spooky__

on Oct 09, 2009

Patches are usually an archive (one file), unless it's game specific. I am usually maxed out with any downloads from impulse, be it full games or just patches.

Netriak

on Oct 09, 2009

It's not the difference between 1 file or many. It is the difference between servers. I can also get that same difference I mentioned just by installing another game. Some games seem to be located on a server with a fast connection to where I live, others are very slow.

Can you find another explanation for why I can download one game with 10MB/sec and another with barely 400KB/sec?

AIAndy

on Oct 09, 2009

In most cases Impulse uses my full connection for downloads with somewhere around 1.4MB/s.

Sevenix

on Oct 09, 2009

I have to totally agree with Brad on this.

Here in sweden I got a fast 100/100 Mbit connection and its not uncommon that I download from Impulse with close to 10 Mbyte/sec

You know something is fast when its actually faster to download Demigod then it is to extract it!

Netriak

on Oct 09, 2009

I have an 100/100 Mbit connection too, and downloading Demigod is indeed faster than extracting it. But do you also have the problem that some games do not download fast at all?

Fuzzy Logic

on Oct 09, 2009

I'm on the fastest speed possible for where I live. Demigod took 5 hours to download...

Netriak

on Oct 09, 2009

I'm on the fastest speed possible for where I live. Demigod took 5 hours to download...

That would give you about 1mbit/sec, if I calculate that correctly. Although it is not that fast, it is still faster than dial up. Some countries still have areas where you are stuck with that.

Kitkun

on Oct 09, 2009

zakai1369

reply 15

Download Speed: 2881 kbps (360.1 KB/sec transfer rate) that is about what i get anytime i run a speed test on my connection and what it should top out at according to what I pay for but anytime I'm downloading through Impulse I notice it showing download speeds usually between 450KB/sec and 500KB/sec.

So yeah Impulse.

I forgot to mention that I have a similar experience here. Impulse is so fast that it skates around my ISP's bandwidth restriction to download at twice the speed of my connection's limit.

aLap

on Oct 09, 2009

Impulse is absolutely awesome with speed. About 1.3Mbit consistent download for me (most of the time). I don't know how you guys managed to pull this off even in China. LOL!

I get some fluctuating 200-900kbps with Steam...

Just get more of the good games widely available and Impulse will most definitely become gaming bliss!

Ah, yes... worldwide availability... triple A games... like DA:O...

Nesrie

on Oct 09, 2009

Wow. I am neer even close to top speeds for my connection. When I do a speed test it tests fine, but downloads, highest I have seen is maybe 600KB I believe. Then again, if i have two going at once, one of them drops to 25KB and the other around 450KB so I am thinking Charter has downloads throttled somehow as these downloads weren't even from the same service.

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