This is a sponsored review
Lets talk about VOIP in-game options. It’s essential - last thing you want to be doing when working on something complicated and time-critical is trying to explain with text communication. Currently I use at least 4 different ways to talk to my teammates when playing games.
- TeamSpeak: the ubiquitous TeamSpeak is the oldest and most reliable gaming VOIP service available. Occasionally laggy and echo-y
- Skype: internet telephony. This gives much better quality voice than TS, but doesn’t integrate well with games
- X-fire: they took IM and made it game compatible. Integrates fantastically with every popular game on the market but voice sound quality is poor at best. Stick to the IM guys!
- Ventrillo: the New TeamSpeak. Skype-like quality, with no lag, and integrating with most games. Downside? Less popular than TS
Mainly these days I’m using TS when multi-player Counter-Strike (4+) because the server is TS enabled, but occasionally I just leave Skype running in the background to my friend and we both jump on the same server. X-fire’s advantage comes in here because you can right-click your friends name and “Join server”.
What about Ventrillo? Well Dallas Xtreme asked me[1] to check out their Ventrillo hosting and I decided to see if it could match my TS experiences. If you check out their site you’ll see a list on the left hand side that shows London, England, Ashburn, Virginia, etc. These are test servers. I chose the London server as my testing ground since it’s close to Dublin here.
Was I impressed? With their server, yes. Voice quality was more than adequate, and lag was non-existent. With the non-server elements, well Ventrillo is a pretty polished piece of software.
Update
Chris has some interesting technical info in the comments section:
I wouldn’t say your experience was exactly typical. Heres the breakdown:
Teamspeak supports a number of quality levels (codecs). It ships with one of the lowest enabled, because it takes up less bandwidth. Teamspeak uses UDP, a connectionless protocol, to send data. This is faster than TCP/IP, but less reliable.
Ventrillo supports a number of codecs also. It ships with one of the highest enabled, because it sounds good. Vent uses TCP/IP, which can cause enormous lag if packets are dropped, but with guaranteed delivery you will always hear exactly what others said.
In summary: Vent sounds better out of the box, but may effect your game performance by hogging bandwidth. Teamspeak may occasionally sound worse, especially out of the box, but will have a much less noticable effect on gameplay.
Here’s my reply to his comment:
Thanks for the detail, I hadn’t seen it broken down as simply as TeamSpeak using UDP, Ventrillo using TCP before.
Regards sound quality vs lag… well I was going to say that that’s an easy one to answer - I’ll take the lower quality any day, but don’t lag me! But on consideration, that’s not quite true - it depends on circumstance.
In a hectic game of CounterStrike, where 1/100 of a second makes a difference then lag is unacceptable, but dropping voice packets is acceptable.
In the slower paced game of World of Warcraft at length discussion of your raid’s strategy is vital, but 1/100 of a second lag is normally dealt with quite well by the game network code.
So on that basis I would go for TeamSpeak with UDP. For WoW I would say that communication quality is more important, thus being more suited to Ventrillo.
Would I recommend dallasxtreme.com? I don’t know. I certainly don’t think you’re going to have any issue with the quality of communications. If I were you I’d first of all check out the test servers, and when happy, take a look at the pricing options and see if you’re happy with the price.
Ratings: overall: 7/10 (quality 8/10; value 6/10 (because their competitors at the low-end are free))
1. (ReviewMe does not require reviews to be positive, these are my true opinions)
