Scaling Properties of Client-Server Architectures

The most significant drawback of the dominant client-server game architecture is its reliance on a single server to maintain the game. The server is a single point of failure, must be carefully provisioned and maintained, and creates a fundamental limit on computational and network resources. In this section, we quantify these limitations: first, we estimate the bandwidth requirements of FPS games theoretically. We then perform an empirical study of Quake II to pinpoint its computational and bandwidth scaling properties.