Is this guy right about wireless vs wired networking for gaming?

[Theminecraftaddict555]

" There is no gaming performance difference at all between WI-FI and Ethernet. The limitation is your NIC, not the mode of transport. Even with .11bg, your max throughput is still 54Mbps at <1ms between you and your gateway, if configured correctly. "

Is that true at all? I would think there would be a difference in gaming performance in terms of lag when it comes to wifi and ethernet?

[nobiggieBIG]

2 minutes ago, Theminecraftaddict555 said:

" There is no gaming performance difference at all between WI-FI and Ethernet. The limitation is your NIC, not the mode of transport. Even with .11bg, your max throughput is still 54Mbps at <1ms between you and your gateway, if configured correctly. "

Is that true at all? I would think there would be a difference in gaming performance in terms of lag when it comes to wifi and ethernet?

Its more about stability

[AnonymousGuy]

Not really.  The limitation is your home to the ISP and to the server, not the 50 feet between your system and router.

 

Although, 2.4Ghz can get really noisy in high density areas, but 5Ghz fixes this.

[79wjd]

There is more latency with wifi, but, I don't really have any issues gaming over wifi. (I occasionally get a lag spike here or there that seems to be caused by the wifi scanning for connections in the area -- this can be disabled in a cmd window).

 

To be clear, a shitty wifi adapter (or wireless router) is a nightmare for gaming, but a good one is fine. 

[nobiggieBIG]

3 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

There is more latency with wifi, but, I don't really have any issues gaming over wifi. (I occasionally get a lag spike here or there that seems to be caused by the wifi scanning for connections in the area -- this can be disabled in a cmd window).

 

To be clear, a shitty wifi adapter (or wireless router) is a nightmare for gaming, but a good one is fine. 

how to disable @djdwosk97

[APasz]

7 minutes ago, Theminecraftaddict555 said:

" There is no gaming performance difference at all between WI-FI and Ethernet. The limitation is your NIC, not the mode of transport. Even with .11bg, your max throughput is still 54Mbps at <1ms between you and your gateway, if configured correctly. "

Is that true at all? I would think there would be a difference in gaming performance in terms of lag when it comes to wifi and ethernet?

Under the right conditions, there is no difference to the average gamer.

 

[brwainer]

I have a very good wireless setup in my house. I also work for an ISP that manages both wired and wireless internet in apartment complexes, where we typically install 1 $500+ enterprise AP for every 2.5 apartments (so one per every 5-10 people). I can tell you that one ethernet, you should *never* see ping times within your local network (i.e., pinging your router or another computer int he LAN) greater than 1ms. When testing on wireless, due to the fact that devices have to share airtime (every device gets a turn to talk) you will get some pings that respond in 1ms, but the average will be around 5-10ms and the max can be as high as 500ms or worse, if the wireless is actively being used by more than one person/device. If there is just a single device, then you can get wireless pings that are almost as low as wired - but it will never be as low.

 

As for impact on gaming, unless you have a very heavily congested wireless network, with pings (to the router) averaging more than 25ms, or packet loss when pinging your router, you will not notice any issue most of the time on wireless. You may still have more issues than on wired just due to spikes in activity.

[tlink]

that entirely depends on the setup. the differences in latency can be so low that they are neglectible. i get a 4ms ping over ethernet pinged to google via cmd.exe over wifi i get 7ms ping to google. the difference is neglectable. thats on a 30 bucks router without external antenna's and on a laptop wifi card placed about 2 meters from the AP.

[NoobCase]

Latency and random packet loss is the reason ethernet is considered superior. Speeds on the internet is more or less the same unless you have above 500mb/s connwction

[MrKickkiller]

15 minutes ago, Theminecraftaddict555 said:

" There is no gaming performance difference at all between WI-FI and Ethernet. The limitation is your NIC, not the mode of transport. Even with .11bg, your max throughput is still 54Mbps at <1ms between you and your gateway, if configured correctly. "

Is that true at all? I would think there would be a difference in gaming performance in terms of lag when it comes to wifi and ethernet?

Although I do not have conclusive imperical data around this subject, I'm gonna call this fake.

Yes 802.11g has a max troughput of 54Mbit/s. Correction: That's a max physical layer bit rate without any error correcting codes. Average troughput is probably around 25Mbit/s. That said: 25 Mbit/s is plenty for the relatively low amount of data transmitted.

 

Your NIC is plenty fast enough to handle the data dropped down from the application layer. If anything, it's rated for a max speed X by the 802.11 specification.

 

With wireless it's definetely more about the reliability of the connection. Wi-Fi is a broadcast medium. Meaning that everyone can detect it and use it. There's a high likelyhood of radio waves (the basics of Wi-Fi) interfering and manipulating/disrupting the signal. Interference would lead to data packets arriving at either end of the medium (your nic or the nic of your Acces point) with either wrong data or a different number for the checksum or not arriving at all. (Look up IPV4 packet syntax). This would to the resulting packet not being received by your client or the server (that is a couple of hops away from you). General TCP behaviour is that if a packet is lost in transmission, wait a certain timeout and retransmit it. So you can probably see the problem here.

 

Even with a decently low chance of signal interference due to channels and such, only a single packet lost could end up with the game being starved for data to/from the server for >150 milliseconds (Probably even more with a bad connection : TCP protocol adjusts retransmission timeout based on succes rate (Kinda)). This could lead to you registering a headshot on your end, but in reality the other player was 0.5m right of where you aimed.

 

With a wire, you're (most likely) using a medium that is just between you and the router/gateway. No interference, straight copper connections etc. Packet loss should be at its minimum here.

[79wjd]

23 minutes ago, nobiggieBIG said:

how to disable @djdwosk97

netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled=no interface="Wi-Fi"

 

That will prevent the computer from connecting to wifi upon a fresh boot/restart, but you can either manually connect via cmd line, or enable autoconfig then connect and disable autoconfig. 

[Donut417]

I used to game on WiFI, now I am on wired. The only difference is slightly lower ping. Like stated above. If you some what okish conditions it should not matter. 5Ghz takes care of the interference issues for the most part. 

[tt2468]

11 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Not really.  The limitation is your home to the ISP and to the server, not the 50 feet between your system and router.

 

Although, 2.4Ghz can get really noisy in high density areas, but 5Ghz fixes this.

Except for the fact that wifi is horribly unstable compared to ethernet. Ping will ALWAYS be higher on wifi, and network drops/lag spikes happen more often.