Gaming Routers Won't Improve Your Ping - Here's The Data!
Posted by DylanRtings@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 111 comments
After conducting an in-depth investigation on 11 different routers, data suggests that the router you purchased has little to no impact on your in-game latency.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
Hey! I wrote the article and would love to discuss our findings! I kept seeing people asking for the best gaming routers, and people just got told it wasn't a thing... so I decide to put it to the test and understand the why behind it. Would love to know if the tests match your experience.
Zettabite@reddit
Ooh! i've wanted to do a write up like this for a long time but I dont have the setup to test it. Overall a good video and targeted to hardware which makes sense considering thats your sites thing but since you did go a bit above the hardware itself, here's a few notes if you wanted to dive a bit deeper
For me, if someone needs to use wireless they need any router that supports Wifi 6E.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
Hey! Glad we could take that off your shoulders! (I also wanted to personally do this for a while, but now I get paid to do it... so, problem solved!). Solid list of recommendations as well:
- For ping, we quickly found that some QoS implementations don’t prioritize ICMP packets, which broke our test. Most games use the UDP protocol, while ping uses ICMP. We initially thought we could emulate UDP packets with fast ping requests, but some QoS setups simply drop ping packets due to their low priority.
- We briefly explored 6GHz vs 5GHz and didn’t see much difference in our office. The contrast between 2.4GHz and 5GHz was stunning, though! We have thick concrete walls between us and the neighbors, so 5GHz interference wasn’t a major issue. Still, I’d love to test this more thoroughly but we need a better setup before we can dive deeper.
- Wi-Fi 7 introduces a bunch of features like MU-MIMO, MLO, and OFDMA, which are supposed to improve latency. I haven’t seen solid data proving that yet... so I’m hoping to test it soon! When we first looked into MLO, we actually got worse bitrate than using pure 6GHz. We still don’t fully understand why, so we’re eager to investigate further.
- I assume as much as well. Here, “wired” really just means Ethernet. PowerLine adapters and MoCA devices I'd like to test too... so many interesting things to explore!
Your conclusion is spot-on: if you're buying a new router today and want it to last, Wi-Fi 6E is affordable enough that it’s a no-brainer for future-proofing
austinzone813@reddit
Ping requires the CPU of the device to create a response to a request. It also depends on who you are pinging. If you’re pinging the router then the router has to interrupt the cpu and at a software level the device has to craft a packet to send in response. It is not a valid test to check gaming I/o performance.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
I'm with you on this one. And also, ICMP is not prioritized by most QoS. That is why we tested the latency directly with our own Counter-Strike 2 server on our controlled network. CS2 has good diagnostics and network info in the console which let us compare routers and their QoS implementation with a real scenario.
bogglingsnog@reddit
Beam forming had a bigger impact on my overall wireless performance than any other fancy new feature.
VenditatioDelendaEst@reddit
Try Flent maybe?
As for Wifi, perhaps ask Jim Salter. Unfortunately I can't find anything he's written recently, but he understands the importance of airtime and talks about it on podcasts.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
Yeah, I did explore Flent and it's a great tool! We also looked at using a more barebones iPerf test to measure latency with UDP packets, but I preferred to go directly with Counter-Strike while testing QoS just in case some routers based their QoS algorithm on some tags like a port number or a pattern in the traffic that we would not properly emulate with an iPerf/Flent test? (I don't know... there are supposed to be some powerful AI QoS model in some routers as advertised by their marketing... but we have no clue of what they are supposed to be doing...so we didn't want to take any chances here).
And thanks for the Jim Salter recommendation! I'll look into his stuff!
ashenderien@reddit
Do y'all have any intention of doing reviews of some of the prosumer offerings from ubiquiti or firewalla type brands that don't include wifi? It would be cool to get some extra baseline (although likely not as applicable to many readers/viewers.)
As someone who uses small APs scattered thru the house served by a more central router, (and NEVER games on wifi) all-in-one router reviews are always frustratingly useless, but I understand if economically its not really worth the time/review space. :(
sp_RTINGS@reddit
I would definitely like to test more advanced routers! The official way is to vote for our next product to test here: https://www.rtings.com/vote/router, but as you said, it doesn't reach as broad of an audience, so I'm doing internal work to try and get at least one Ubiquiti router on the test bench. Let me know which model you'd prefer!
Zettabite@reddit
doesntmatterol@reddit
Wireless engineer with several years of Wi-Fi testing experience at a major ISP here.
MU-MIMO and OFDMA are both features of 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6, not Wi-Fi 7. Definitely are worth testing, and tend to show a minor improvement in a home environment. OFDMA particularly is helpful in highly congested environments, and its implementation quality is probably going to actually be the most notable difference you’ll see between two otherwise identical seeming routers. Home stuff is just typically really really poor at adhering to the spec.
Latency for MLO is going to be probably going to be tough to test in any feasible, useful way without renting multiple buildings in various different types of density and with different building materials, but if you figure something out then please definitely make this content because the world needs it to exist outside of internal databases at wireless manufacturers. Anecdotally, the BE200 chipset is the only one I’ve seen anyone on my team have any luck with getting MLO to not totally suck when using consumer clients, so if you were using a phone as a test client, that may be what your results were inconclusive.
prajaybasu@reddit
How so? 5 and 6 GHz are the carrier frequencies and have nothing to do with Wi-Fi latency. Congestion can increase latency as you pointed out, but 6 GHz won't be improving latency if you live in the middle of bumfuck.
Zettabite@reddit
You're thinking of the connection end to end. You -> Router -> External server. The connection between you and the router is an addition to the total. From memory:
On top of that, 5GHz gets very crowded in condos, which is why i bought 6E on a whim to try and fix my issues.
So if Router -> server is 50ms add the above and thats your total latency.
prajaybasu@reddit
My lowest ping to my 5 GHz Wi-Fi 6 router is 0.4ms.
Zettabite@reddit
I used pingplotter and sent 100 ping per second to my router, which isolates just that portion of the connection. it graphs it out.. there is an obvious pattern of latency for each connection type.
prajaybasu@reddit
That's fine, but 6 GHz is literally the same RF and protocol as 5 GHz. It's the exact same Wi-Fi chips and antennas.
There is no inherent latency benefit with 6 GHz just because the number is higher, it's not like CPU frequency.
The 5 GHz band in your space was congested and that is probably why you had a higher latency since you had to share the channel. Or your router was older or farther away than your 6 GHz router.
Zettabite@reddit
So those latencies were from memory, which were possibly during a high usage time where the 5GHz band was more saturated. I just reran it now and its not as different as i remember it, but there are more frequent spikes on 5GHz, and fewer less significant spikes on 6GHz.
A quick 1 minute test:
5GHz Min 0.14 Max 124.7 Avg 2.95
6GHz Min 0.21 Max 26.13 Avg 1.83
Im not sure i inferred 6GHz was faster because higher number. It was intended as less used band, less overlap from neighbors due to poor penetration through walls. You clipped out this part of my comment
Which i do so my tests were tainted.
Your comment does make me wonder why it wouldnt be faster though.. the signal itself will move at the same pace but the carrier wave is tighter. 5,000,000,000 vs 6,000,000,000 waves per second. So assuming it carries at the same rate/wave, 6Ghz would provide the data 20% faster. To compare to a cpu, it does boost its clock speed to run faster. Its not a direct correlation of 20% faster clock means 20% more performance but it is faster.
I cant find any articles on wifi carries waves and frequency efficiency in related to 5 vs 6 ghz.. so if you know more id love to hear it.
prajaybasu@reddit
Other than sharing 5 GHz with your neighbors, your PC is also sharing it with other devices on your Wi-Fi. Most people don't have 6 GHz capable devices yet other than their laptops.
For my 2.4 GHz band, here are the results after a hundred pings or so:
Minimum = 0.92ms, Maximum = 60.74ms, Average = 2.17ms
Zettabite@reddit
ahhh. ok, i see my error. I made the assumption my situation is the normal situation. Both by 2.4 and 5 GHz bands are so insanely congested in my building. I can see at least 10 Wifis on each band in the 2.4 and 5 but 6 is wide open.
DeathStalker-77@reddit
I will have to try that. I need to monitor my router anyway, as I keep getting frequent "pauses" (both 2.4 & 5.0 - I made a separate post on that).
Zettabite@reddit
Might want to get Wifi analyzer on an android, not sure what apple has.. and see how many other wifis there are and overlapping on the band you're using. If there arent any try to change to an open band. If you cant then 6GHz will likely help.
DeathStalker-77@reddit
Ok, I used WiFi Analyzer and found that while I had the router set for Auto (which should automatically switch to the best channels - it's CLEARLY not!), it was using the most congested channels. I switched both to less used channels (2.4 is still rather congested).
sp_RTINGS@reddit
I went to your original post to give you some leads on what to check..... but I think you might have nailed it already. Get off 2.4GHz if possible for you main devices. If you have cameras, or IoT devices, leave them on the 2.4GHz. But your laptops/phone/consoles should all be on 5 or 6GHz if able. Also, I don't trust band steering (I got hurt in the past)... so ensure you have both the 2.4 and 5 GHz on two different SSIDs. Hopefully, this was just it!
DeathStalker-77@reddit
FWIW, I have an Asus GT-AX6000 router, current Asus firmware.
DeathStalker-77@reddit
Yes, I do have the 2 bands separate and distinct. Unfortunately, some items aren't 5.0 compatible. My LG S90TR Soundbar doesn't appear to want to connect on 5.0, but my LG G4 is OK - unfortunately, for them to work together, they have to be on the same band.
Zettabite@reddit
Yea, auto select never seemed to work for me on any router i've had. If the lower congestion still has 4+ wifis on it, it may be worth buying a 6GHz router, assuming your laptop/pc also has one. I bought a 6E capable router and a 6E PCIe wifi card for my desktop as it was really my only option.
DeathStalker-77@reddit
I installed PingTools, but am not able to effectively interpret the graphs. 😕
DeathStalker-77@reddit
Router only supports 2.4 & 5.0, not 6.0. I have an Android.
althaz@reddit
It wired over powerline kinda destroys 6Ghz WiFi for gaming still from my quick tests (WiFi7 with the GT-BE98 which I unboxed this morning). Not because of better ping (close enough to the same at my house), but because of less packet loss. How much that matters depends on which games you play (ie: I think it matters a lot more for non-shooters with physics-based games like Rocket League right at the top of the tree for sensitivity to packet loss). But considering the only competitive games I player are RTS games (not particularly latency or packet-loss sensitive) and Rocket League (extraordinarily sensitive to packet loss and latency variation) I would say powerline adaptors are at least 10x better for my situation than wifi for gaming.
That all said my home is now wired up with Cat 6A, so I'm using that and my interest is purely academic :).
Zettabite@reddit
Interesting... i dont get much packet loss. 6GHz doesnt go through walls very well, how far away is your router?
althaz@reddit
15m or so, I think there's three internal walls in the way. It doesn't take much packet loss at all to hurt some types of games though.
Zettabite@reddit
mine is 7m and nearly in LOS, maybe going around 1 corner. 3 walls seems like 6GHz wouldnt make it through. Would really love it if /u/sp_RTINGS could do some tests :D
sp_RTINGS@reddit
Oh yeah, understanding range is a really interesting topic! We're already looking into it. So far, our biggest "finding" is that it can get deep and complex... fast!
5 and 6 GHz are well known for having lower penetration than 2.4 GHz, which is scientifically true. But in my testing, even when I'm far from the router, I still get better bitrates on 5 or 6 GHz than 2.4 GHz ever provides: When I'm close to my router, I get my full 400 Mbps ISP bandwidth without issue. And when I'm far away, enjoying the sun while networking, I still get 100 Mbps... which is better than the 60 Mbps I can ever reach on 2.4 GHz, which drops to 30 Mbps when I'm far.
So yeah, you lose a lot of performance in terms of percentage, but the raw performance is still much better on 5-6 GHz.
You can quickly test your own setup by doing speed tests at different spots in your house and creating your own "heat map" to understand how your home affects your Wi-Fi signal. It takes a short while, but it's worth the exercise! There are also ways to see the signal strength in dBm directly, but I don’t know if that’s a reliable metric (yet). For me, the speed test is the low-effort way to quickly troubleshoot or understand what’s happening.
If you want to take it a step further, you can run simulations here: https://design.ui.com/login. You’ll need to create a free account, and you’ll only have access to Ubiquiti products. Ideally, you should upload your home floor plan, but you can also just place a Wi-Fi router and add a few walls to get an idea of how much attenuation you’ll be facing. Notice the wall type has a definitive impact... I have an old house with cement walls... so going through the wooden floor is easier for the Wi-Fi to pass!
Note: there isn’t much surface bouncing modeled (I need to look into whether that’s an oversimplification), but I think it leans toward the truth—especially for 5-6 GHz, which are heavily absorbed.
Sorry for the wall of text and no definitive answer, but hopefully this gives you some experimentation ideas!
Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit
Real people live in home with walls between their devices and their router. Any test of a router without obstructions is pretty pointless from a real world perspective.
Zettabite@reddit
I live in a condo.. my PC has a narrow LOS to the router, but realistically its probably bouncing a bit and is about 7m away. The not going through walls is actually a big benefit from my POV as it will reduce the range and overlap of other units. Being in a house that is more isolated the 5GHz band is likely less full and might be better for that use case.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
I would not have expected that, interesting! I really rarely get packet loss on 5GHz or 6Ghz at the office... but environmental noise is definitely a big differentiating factor here. Or as u/Zettabite points out, maybe it's range.
Packet loss is always awful in any time sensitive applications, games or video calls being the main ones. I do like the insight that physics game being more sensitive to it! I didn't think about that..!
dax331@reddit
PowerLine maybe, but MoCa is objectively better than WiFi, unless you’re using rg-59 cabling or something. Obviously has more latency than direct Ethernet though.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
David Bombal made a video comparing Ethernet, Powerline adapters and MoCa (among others): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBsMch7-TjY
The video gives a nice baseline for speed at least (and security, which is his main interest). It's the only resource I found that compared Powerline and MoCa with an actual test.
I would like to make my own tests and compare more products!
omar_trader@reddit
An article on the best wired routers in terms of their QoS handling and buffer bloat for gaming would be nice.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
Wired was sooooo good compared to wireless that I didn't even think that it would need to be optimized.
Just the fact that Ethernet is full-duplex, meaning both the access point and the client can send packets at the same time means that you don't need no Guard Interval before sending packets, you don't care about packet collision when sent at the same time, etc. In the tests we did with a wired connection, I'm not even sure you can congest your network with data and feel bufferbloat
I would assume you will start hitting different bottlenecks when using a wired connection: Either your ISP bandwidth limitation needs to be upgraded if you constantly hit that limit, or maybe you are reaching your router's hardware limit like the switching CPU, its CPU or RAM of the routers itself before the packets become a problem. In this case, a high-end router with better switches, CPU and RAM might be the answer. If you have more than 100Mbps of ISP limit, QoS will probably not help, as QoS will need more of the CPU/RAM ressources from the router to do proper triage the more data comes through it as other commenters have pointed out.
That said, testing wired connection is a good test idea to explore different limits of routers!
omar_trader@reddit
Yeah, I'm not sure as to the exact cause, but I've experienced cases where just some torrent traffic far below the ISP bandwidth limit can cause lag in games for another computer when they're both wired. I assume it's related to transferring lots of small packets as opposed to one large high bandwidth download/upload. Something to consider when testing.
Also, the differences won't be as significant as your wifi findings, but even single digit ms differences due to a router are pretty significant when it comes to gaming.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
This is outside of what I experiment with, so take this with a grain of salt:
At the router level, all packets are quite small (max around 1500 bytes). Your network interface card is basically disassembling the large chunk of data into smaller packets (or reassembling them if it's downloading). I might not be technically right here, but packets are all small, that I know.
Meaning, small and fast gaming packets and big torrents are just seen as a constant stream of data that the router needs to triage.
My best bet here is that you might be hitting the hardware limit of your router, like what happened with our little Linksys E5400. If you have a beast of a router, make sure it is not overheating which might be throttling its performance.
A good rule of thumb is to check your port's speed. If your router only has 100Mbps ports, expect lower performance switching CPU. If you have a few 2.5Gbps or more ports, then your hardware should be fine to handle those. And it will also depend on your ISP speed as well, but I'm assuming you are around 500Mbps or under.
Now, a few quick-checks maybe since you mentioned torrenting: Ensure your latency problems are not simply due to a peak in torrenting speed. A safe approach would be to throttle your torrent speed limit to a percentage of your ISP. 80-90% if you are alone, maybe a bit less if you have other people wanting to stream high-quality while you game and torrent.
Also, be careful with your upload ISP speed... some ISPs have awfully low limit, and if you are seeding, you might be bloating your upload link only, and gaming needs both download and upload.
Hopefully this helps in some way!
omar_trader@reddit
I think it was mostly due to an older router, but after doing some testing with this tool on a newer one (still a mediocre ISP router), I'm able to momentarily spike the latency into the 150-350ms range for a couple of samples during the download and upload portion of the test by starting a 10KB/s upload on a torrent on another PC. There seems to be some context switching or firewall behavior when initializing a connection from another PC and/or port that adds quite a bit of latency. Without doing that, it just adds an average of 10ms when maxing out a gigabit download and 3ms when maxing out a gigabit upload, with a pretty normal standard distribution around those. If it's not started during the test and is running before hand it will behave normally.
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
sp_RTINGS@reddit
Interesting test! The bufferbloat test, while downloading or uploading is meant to saturate your network bandwidth, so a 10KB/s upload on the side really shouldn't matter, as you are already uploading a lot more data by the bufferbloat test.
So yeah, something is off.
Plus, if you are using a mediocre ISP router, I don't expect any shiny/advance/smart features...There are some QoS implementation that automatically triage your data, but it might need a few packets before it can correctly do the triage.... or you might have some security features that pops up when a new connection is established. But I don't know any ISP router that would push those out (but I have only tested a few of those since they are hard to get by).
This is unfortunately getting out of what I know. I'm still curious to understand the behavior though! It might be worth it to make a post on r/HomeNetworking
capybooya@reddit
This is the kind of practical content I appreciate. I could kind of guess that the gaming specific branding was BS, but that QoS does work to some extent now is very useful to know.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
Glad you enjoyed :)
QoS definitely has value! Hopefully, you can avoid needed it altogether, but it's a nice plan B to have set up that can kick-in in times of need. Keep in mind that most routers offer some kind of QoS, and even a basic implementation can help. You don't need AI powered auto-detecting QoS!
BlueGoliath@reddit
Is hardware an absolute factor in performance or does software bloat play a big factor? Do any of these advertise being flashable with custom firmware?
sp_RTINGS@reddit
As far as I know, no router advertises that it can be flashed with custom firmware. Flashing custom firmware will most likely void the warranty or any support from the manufacturer. That said, there are open-source options like OpenWRT and DD-WRT, as well as brand-specific firmware such as Asuswrt-Merlin or FreshTomato (for Broadcom chipsets).
We tested OpenWRT, since GL.iNet routers come with it out of the box. It offered the most extensive QoS features, giving access to virtually all open-source algorithms available. Some routers had customizable QoS settings, but while we didn’t attempt to fully optimize each implementation, we were somewhat disappointed with QoS overall.
QoS can help tremendously, but it won’t completely eliminate bufferbloat issues. You will get the best results by avoiding having a congested network in the first place by throttling downloads, doing backup at night, etc. (if that's an option of course). Still, it's a valuable tool to keep your network from becoming fully congested—or at least make it less prone to bloating and can come in clutch if your little brother just decides to start a download while you're gaming.
Flaimbot@reddit
regarding bufferbloat, for avm fritzbox 7590 i had to go into the service settings (that reset themselves on reboot...) and disable layer2 hw acceleration, on top of limiting the bandwidth in order to eliminate bufferbloat. i think that's a whole topic on its own and very device specific, sometimes without any solution outside of replacing the device with an entirely different model.
theZeitt@reddit
hi, I have done similar testing with 5Ghz and 6Ghz just with 100-500Mbps speeds per device and 1-5 devices simultaneously (goal was testing "streaming locally from pc to pc"). Here are notes that I can share from it:
Number 1 being issue might be more regional thing as here avg internet speed is 150Mbps, (though in reality it is 300+ for "gamers" and 20-50Mbps otherwise).
Number 2 points that there are situation where gaming router can helps: Multitasking with heavy background usage like downloading game/update (Steam and Playstation might similarly download updates on background).
To clarify devices: by "gaming router" I mean more expensive 200+€ routers, most of them had "gaming aesthetics" but similarly priced/expensive non-gaming routers did as good. But non-gaming routers that were expensive are also rarer here. In cheap <100€ routers gaming-aesthetics didnt do anything for performance but were just as bad.
theZeitt@reddit
And basically that 1+2 is why I would personally love to see "max router bandwidth before bufferbloat" in router reviews, it is really impossible information to find and normally I dont have access to 10+ devices to test.
Even atm my home router can handle only 300Mbps before latency quickly increases to hundreds of milliseconds. And that 200+ms latency is something that becomes visible even in normal web browsing, meaning I have to limit any download to half of my maximum (600Mbps) if I want to keep using internet for anything while waiting for download to finish.
Odd_Cauliflower_8004@reddit
https://github.com/PingBastion/PingBastion/tree/beta-ndpi
Wanna make one that might actually work.? Also, once you start using qos Ping is no longer a reliable andmeasure of performance. You can only tell if the game is responsive or not
sp_RTINGS@reddit
I agree, that's why we hosted our Counter-Strike server to feel the lag. Ping is a nice troubleshooting tool, but not a nice tool for hard data.
Odd_Cauliflower_8004@reddit
That sounds awesome,
gruez@reddit
???
QOS is only a factor if your connection is saturated/congested. If very little is happening on your connection while you're gaming then qos won't make a difference. Moreover your script either assumes the PC it's running on is the only device generating traffic on your network, or you're running the script on a custom box serves as the gateway instead of your router. The former is unlikely given how many devices even a single person has, and the latter is a fairly uncommon setup.
austinzone813@reddit
I’m not sure why your tests don’t include competing devices located in different places. The antenna arrays are meant to support MIMO and don’t think MIMO was mentioned one time in your review.
In real world testing competing Wi-Fi loads should be tested spatially disparate as they could be IRL. So do your test with a 1gb internet link. Start your gaming pc located in one position of the room. Then fire up a 2nd device located somewhere else from the router (different direction) and have it start applying load. Then have a 3rd device in a different direction start applying a different load.
One of the competing devices should do video streaming. Another should be doing simulated web browsing. Try and create an environment with 3-4 devices all doing realistic tasks to compete for BW but make sure they are located in different locations on the horizontal plane.
dfv157@reddit
A N100 based multi-gig (2.5G) firewall appliance is super cheap. A 2.5G switch is super cheap. A Wifi6e/7 AP is moderately cheap.
A open source (opnsense) router is priceless.
Y0tsuya@reddit
I'm on gigabit fiber. My black box opnsense appliance is i3 and I get <5ms to the 1st hop even under heavy load with tons of connections. Everything stationary, which includes people's "gaming battlestations" should be wired ethernet. But people rather screw with WiFi all day then complain about it.
dfv157@reddit
By all means if you are able to not have to use WiFi at all, do so. But feel free to come pay for an electrician to run eth through a 2 story house to each room :)
Y0tsuya@reddit
Running ethernet cables is an easy one-afternoon DIY job. Just buy some cable clips from Home Depot and route those along baseboards and door jambs. There's no high voltage so I don't understand why people insist on hiring electricians for that.
dfv157@reddit
Wife will rage with exposed eth running around everywhere. If I’m going to have eth in the rooms they need to be inside the walls.
So no, not a DIY job for me.
Y0tsuya@reddit
My condolences. Though you'd understand most of us have wives who are fine with seeing a few cables.
Avalanc89@reddit
QoS/SQM implementations weren't good (not tested this for a while) years ago in poplar routers. That's why I've bought a good router from 2000' for pennies and installed open source software to use its QoS. For faster bandwidth CPU is too slow but for like 25 or 50 Mbps is ok.
tepmoc@reddit
There plenety routers nowdays that can handle 1gbit (or close to it with sqm enabled) and not break your wallet and openwrt can be installed without any hassle.
Back in days you had like one and half models to select from and half of them require open box and soldering serial pins.
GoombazLord@reddit
Not if you want Wi-Fi 7 unfortunately. OpenWRT support lags behind the new hardware more than it used to.
AnEagleisnotme@reddit
WiFi 7 isn't that important, the range on 6ghz is tiny, and it brings no improvement to 2.4
phire@reddit
Yeah, I used to have a great SQM setup on openwrt.
But when I upgraded from 100Mbit to Gigabit, I just turned it off.
Not only was the CPU just not fast enough, but I found that my local connection simply wasn't the bottleneck anymore. Gigabit is fast enough that your downloads are almost always bottlenecked by remote severs.
vegetable__lasagne@reddit
Yeah I remember a while ago I had a 5Mbit connection, installed Tomato on a $20 router and had zero issues with ping spikes even if multiple people were using it at the same time.
Stilgar314@reddit
ASUS routers remind me Sauron's crown.
KoldPurchase@reddit
Ok, I want one now.
😁
Obsydeon_@reddit
Should one riddle their home with ubiquiti routers?
pppjurac@reddit
DIY with pfsense and good set of NIC that can hardware offload processing from CPU.
PolarisX@reddit
Screeches in Mikrotik scripts
FranciumGoesBoom@reddit
but does Mikrotik have etherlighting?
PolarisX@reddit
Is that the RGB thing?
Lakku-82@reddit
Does anyone think they do? I have a ‘gaming’ router but because it has multiple 10Gbe ports and the others are 2.5-5Gbps. That’s not cheap in any situation. I don’t care about the ping nor the claims of any maker. There are other reasons to possibly buy them depending on situation.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
Oh, definitely! Gaming routers do have their ups! The focus here was really only about latency, as I saw a lot of people hoping that changing their routers would finally help resolve their in-game ping/jitter issues when the problem is usually coming from elsewhere.
DeathStalker-77@reddit
I may try the 14 day trial of PingPlotter - are there any other alternatives?
lintstah1337@reddit
If you actually care about ping
1) ISP type is the most important:
-Fiber (FTTH/GPON): 1~10ms
-Cable Modem (DOCSIS): 10~30ms
-DSL (ADSL/VDSL): 20~60ms
-Starlink: 20-50ms
-Dial-up (POTS): 150~300ms
A 100mbps Fiber would have lower latency than 100mbps Cable.
2) local connection type
Although WiFi 6 made big improvements, but WiFi still suffers from jitter and it is very noticeable on CS2 when dueling as an example.
3) Bufferbloat mitigation
The lower the available bandwidth, the more susceptible the network is to bufferbloat.
Cake SQM is the best bufferbloat mitigation when properly configured. It is very important that you properly configure the link layer adaptation so it can account for the packet overhead depending on your ISP type (imagine shipping a 5lbs item, you also have to account for the weight of the shipping package so it doesn't underestimate the actual weight). The only weakness of Cake SQM is it needs a lot of processing power so the faster your ISP is the more powerful the router CPU needs to be. Cake SQM also does not account for when your internet speed fluctuates (It needs to know the bandwidth in order to function properly).
Maldiavolo@reddit
> Although WiFi 6 made big improvements, WiFi still suffers from jitter and it is very noticeable on CS2 when dueling as an example.
Do you have an objective source for this? This sounds like Internet lore written by a tech-addled gamer.
Berengal@reddit
If you want an example that's impossible to miss take a look at fighting games. Because they use lock-step synchronization it's really easy to notice dropped packets and jitter because they'll cause pretty obvious glitches like dropped inputs, obvious teleporting and frame skips in animations, temporary freezes, slow-downs, significantly increased input delay etc. It also tends to be more noticeable for the player that's not on wifi both because the way the netcode works makes the glitches larger for them, but also because they get side-by-side comparisons with their non-wifi games while the wifi player will always have jitter in their games. This is why the fighting game community hates wifi and demand that games allow you to reject matches against wifi players.
It's less obvious in other games because they rarely require clients to be in full agreement about the entire game-state in the same way, but while you need more experience and points of comparison to suss out what's going on just by playing, the effect is still there, and depending on the specific mechanics and netcode of a game can be just as influential.
Maldiavolo@reddit
If you want to test wired vs wireless you do it to your local gateway. You aren't directly connected to Google. That being said, what WLAN adapter and WAP are you using? I get a consistent 1ms on my wifi to my gateway.
Terroractly@reddit
Here you are:
https://www.howtogeek.com/217463/wi-fi-vs.-ethernet-how-much-better-is-a-wired-connection/#:~:text=As%20an%20example%2C%20we%20tested,a%20very%20noticeable%20difference%20ingame.
Wifi can have lower latency than ethernet but the second there is any interference from neighbours, celltowers, etc. or other people on the network it'll have transient spikes called jitter. How much you notice the jitter depends on the application and your sensitivity. No one cares about a 10ms increase in ping when watching YouTube, but esports games are much more latency sensitive so that could result in a feeling of network slowness/lag
Maldiavolo@reddit
I'm a network engineer. That article is not good, It doesn't prove anything, has inaccuracies, and provides bad advice. The only thing they cite are other articles of theirs. Probably because it drives ad revenue. The tests they supposedly ran have no information as to how the test was run, what it was run with, or where it was run. They provide zero evidence for anything. My WIFI 6 at home is 1ms latency to my gateway. Humans are not sensitive enough to notice sub ms latency if a cable is faster.
As a gamer I know first hand that gamers love to think they are special and have super-human abilities to detect latency. Human perception of latency is a well studied phenomenon. No one is noticing 10ms latency or jitter in a game, in video, or in audio. Maybe if you are at the threshold of perception and you go above, but that threshold is fairly high for all three categories. Most high availability networking focuses on either sub 30ms or sub 50ms recovery because those are what are considered imperceptible.
Just because it's interesting and adjacent to the topic. Here is a relatively recent study on input latency. Video and a link to the paper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3MaC_1zpMs
https://www.tactuallabs.com/papers/howMuchFasterIsFastEnoughCHI15.pdf
GoombazLord@reddit
Just ping Google for a minute while using Wi-Fi vs Ethernet. The jitter / ping variance is going to be lower on wired every time with substantially fewer outliers.
Maldiavolo@reddit
Umm what? Why would you ping Google if you are interested in WIFI vs Ethernet? Neither Wi-fi nor Ethernet extend directly to Google. You would simply ping to your local gateway to test the media local to you.
GoombazLord@reddit
Your test is better than mine. Mine was dead simple though, everyone knows the URL of Google’s website. Some routers default do different IPs, that’s why I suggested Google.
AntLive9218@reddit
That was the deal breaker for me when I looked into various QoS approaches.
At this point even regular business connections are not dedicated lines, and home connections have incredibly high bandwidth overcommitment. Once (not if, it will happen) the bandwidth drops below what's configured, the result is typically worse than just not using QoS.
lintstah1337@reddit
It is why it is recommended to configure to 90% or lower to have enough headroom in the event your connection fluctuates.
If you have a very unstable connection, there is "cake-autorate" that automatically adjusts the CAKE bandwidth, but at the expense of even more CPU processing power.
AntLive9218@reddit
Latency monitoring is one idea I've had, but damn, 20 Hz sampling for that is either quite excessive, or that's the (theoretical) solution for the next problem typically faced, occasional packet loss messing with way too many expectations.
I'm generally curious about the topic, but I wasn't too happy with any of the solutions offered back when I played with this matter, and in the past years it seems like the "solution" is just ISPs handing out fat enough pipes to solve most of the relevant issues.
With even just mildly unstable connections I've found bandwidth limitation not to really help, especially as services are becoming more and more latency sensitive without retransmission logic being adjusted to accommodate that.
CummingDownFromSpace@reddit
PCs used to be beige/white, then Black PCs started showing up and became all the rage.
Then blue LEDs became the rage.
Then every thing started to have the word 'Gamer'.
Then RGB LEDs became the rage.
Now putting AI on everything is all the rage.
Its all marketing.
ButtPlugForPM@reddit
i mean yeah i thought most ppl knew this..the only ppl who spend 500 bucks on a gaming router,are the same ppl who bought the gold plated,diamon cable HDMI cables for 99 dollars
Aleblanco1987@reddit
Do gaming routers claim to improve ping?
BlueGoliath@reddit
That's because you weren't using a gaming optimized OS like GamerOS. /s
I'm more annoyed by looks than the gamer branding. I don't want RGB on my goddamn router.
sp_RTINGS@reddit
I kind of like the breathing RGBs.......... but I don't want to pay the extra 200$ for them. And don't really like having spiders on my wall.
Prestigious_Sir_748@reddit
but who else is going to eat the bugs?
Flaimbot@reddit
now that's a feature worth advertising
althaz@reddit
Facts. I bought Asus' gaming router because it was a couple of dollars cheaper than the non-gaming version and it has better cooling, but holy shit do I hate how it looks.
Hey marketing guys, gamers who spend hundreds of dollars on a router are probably grown-ups and their partners have to be ok with the things they buy (luckily my wife doesn't care about what the inside of our storeroom/server room looks like :)).
ToughDefinition2591@reddit
I could tell you that without any testing. It's always been a sales gimmick.
M8753@reddit
But do they look cooler?
gayfucboi@reddit
It's great they tested this for home routers.
Now if you are willing to spend for a Ubiquiti dream machine router, with newer switch and AP (some are all integrated now), it has a fairly robust SQM solution built in.
You can configure it to do traffic shapping and priority per vlan using profiles, and it applies that to the switch as well, with 7 levels of priority using DSCP markings.
On the AP you can enable WMM (UAPSD), and that will give some traffic default DSCP markings as it leaves the AP.
The router will respect those markings as it does SQM, and you can remark traffic on the router as it leaves to the WAN as well.
It does take some setup and know how, but the result it really good and I never see my pings out to the ISP go high even during large downloads.
On the UDM model, it now has some QoS priority built in for specific applications and categories, making the setup a little easier if you just want to check a box for that application and set bandwidth limits.
All this is fairly recent on the newer firmwares.
EasyRhino75@reddit
Thank you for proving "well duh" with numbers and video
aphaits@reddit
Wait. I thought this was Mr.Wobbles the youtuber-musician-streamer.
That thumbnail looks so much like him.
exomachina@reddit
He forgot the 3rd part of TRIPLE GAME BOOST:
WTFast VPN.
ISPs and gaming routers bundle with a subscription to WTFast which is more snake and mirrors. It's a VPN that tunnels directly to the major gaming data centers around the world. It's pretty useless if you live anywhere with decent internet infrastructure.
OutdoorRink@reddit
Shout out to r/RTINGS
yo1nkers@reddit
Well no fucking duh.
Gaming routers just generally happen to have somewhat faster CPUs and thus can handle sqm better at higher bandwidth.
And even then they don't hold a candle to a good x86 setup.
reddit-MT@reddit
Good over all. I would just add that a person can make the router the bottleneck if then enable more features on the router than its CPU and RAM can handle. Modern mid-grade or better routers should have enough CPU and RAM these days.
maybeyouwant@reddit
We all know that "gamer" things are not good. Now an AI router, this thing will be truly optimized and great!
Ploddit@reddit
No shit.
tomchee@reddit
It was always a fact, but asus did not print "rip off gamers" logo onto enough stuff