Best QOS for gaming? Traditional vs Cake vs per device Bandwith limiter

[LOST TALE]

Debate. 

 

Also my traditional qos settings doesn't seem to have a setting for most games but does have "The default ACK, SYN and ICMP packets are used to improve the game smoothness."

 

My concern with bandwidth limiter is if 2 people start using their bandwidth limit, it will exceed the total network limit unless I make the per device limit very low.

 

Adaptive qos can also be discussed but I will avoid it because it requires me to agree to poorly outlined spyware agreement with trend micro lol

[Eigenvektor]

Games usually shouldn't need that much in terms of bandwidth and are more bound by latency. So prioritizing ACK, SYN and (maybe?) ICMP as well as small packages might help with that.

 

If two people run into their bandwidth limits I would assume a certain amount of fairness, so both get half the total network bandwidth. As long as packages are prioritized, games should still mostly run fine, even when bandwidth is capped (that's the point of QoS after all). For best performance you'd probably have to analyze what type of packets/ports etc. a game uses to prioritize its particular traffic over say downloads or media streaming (you might also want to give priority to real time stuff like voice chat and/or Skype calls).

[LOST TALE]

8 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Games usually shouldn't need that much in terms of bandwidth and are more bound by latency. So prioritizing ACK, SYN and (maybe?) ICMP as well as small packages might help with that.

 

If two people run into their bandwidth limits I would assume a certain amount of fairness, so both get half the total network bandwidth. As long as packages are prioritized, games should still mostly run fine, even when bandwidth is capped (that's the point of QoS after all). For best performance you'd probably have to analyze what type of packets/ports etc. a game uses to prioritize its particular traffic over say downloads or media streaming (you might also want to give priority to real time stuff like voice chat and/or Skype calls).

So go in there and give blanket higher priority to packets up to a 1KB or something?

 

As for fairness, is that applied even without qos enabled? is it applied with per device bandwidth limiter? so if the connection limit is reached, then the device(s) using most is throttled until the bloat is cleared. Is that how it works?

[Eigenvektor]

29 minutes ago, LOST TALE said:

So go in there and give blanket higher priority to packets up to a 1KB or something?

Either this, or as I said, analyze the traffic of the games you play so that you can give priority to the correct type of packages. If your router can be configured in such detail.

 

Quote

As for fairness, is that applied even without qos enabled? is it applied with per device bandwidth limiter? so if the connection limit is reached, then the device(s) using most is throttled until the bloat is cleared. Is that how it works?

That would depend on the particular QoS implementation and how configurable it is. Ideally you'd want some kind of fair-queueing algorithm and maybe even an option to select between different types/modes. It doesn't necessarily punish those that use the most bandwidth, but rather tries to give a fair share to each device. On a standard home router you probably can't configure any of this (I know mine can't).

 

~edit: The type of traffic that I'd expect to run into a bandwidth limiter would be downloads, file sharing and maybe streaming (movies, not outgoing). With a fair queue every device should get about an equal share of the total bandwidth. To allow games to continue to work when one or more devices are hogging all the bandwidth, the game's traffic should receive a certain amount of priority. To be able to voice chat, this type of traffic should probably be classified as real-time, so it gets even higher priority.

 

Streaming movies might be somewhat problematic because it requires a good deal of bandwidth that should also be fairly steady, so you don't run out of buffer. For a regular download it doesn't matter much so long as you don't disadvantage packets to such a level that you run into some kind of timeout and the download is aborted.

[LOST TALE]

19 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

the game's traffic should receive a certain amount of priority. To be able to voice chat, this type of traffic should probably be classified as real-time, so it gets even higher priority.

 

Isn't gaming supposed to be higher priority than voip? I mean 80 more ms in voip delay isn't going to matter as much as in a game right?

[LOST TALE]

20 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

That would depend on the particular QoS implementation and how configurable it is. Ideally you'd want some kind of fair-queueing algorithm and maybe even an option to select between different types/modes. It doesn't necessarily punish those that use the most bandwidth, but rather tries to give a fair share to each device. On a standard home router you probably can't configure any of this (I know mine can't).

 

But your router supports QOS right?

[Eigenvektor]

32 minutes ago, LOST TALE said:

Isn't gaming supposed to be higher priority than voip? I mean 80 more ms in voip delay isn't going to matter as much as in a game right?

I'd say both are equally sensitive to delay and variance (jitter).

 

If all VoIP packages are delayed by 80 ms, that should be fine. But if network congestion introduces too much jitter it becomes a problem. For best quality you'd want something like 20ms delay and little to no jitter. Up to 150ms and 30 ms jitter should be hardly noticeable. For gaming, depends on the type of game, but I think somewhere around 100ms is still playable, but obviously if you're competitive and it's a fast paced game less is always better.

 

So in a sense it comes down to which of these is more important to you.

 

32 minutes ago, LOST TALE said:

But your router supports QOS right?

It does, but in a very limited fashion. I have three queues (real-time, priority, background) and I can only select things like "anything but email". Not in any way comparable to what you can do with a Cisco router or a Linux based system (which is what I used to have).

[LOST TALE]

@Eigenvektor What max transfered size would be best for gaming? 1KB? and would setting it too low cause jitter? In other words, which risk is cheaper, to have it too high or too low?