how it is possible that computers are so fast that dozens of people from across the world can play video games together simultaneously?

Question

I’ve been thinking about this lately. I guess it just doesn’t make sense to me that 40 years ago we were barely able to move pixels across a screen and now there are games where even hundreds of people can play games like first person shooters on servers simultaneously where reactions down to the millisecond commonly decide the outcome of a game. How can we match the inputs of everyone and have them appear on someone else’s screen? Is it simply that information travels at the speed of light and we are really good at organizing it?

In: 20

Answer 1

To put processing speed into perspective, a modern CPU can, in one second, perform a number of operations that would potentially take a human decades to complete. This obviously depends on complexity and ultimately falls on the programmers to optimize that power, but it really shows the scale between our perceptions of time and what computing can be done in just a few milliseconds.