Is WiFi causing my online gaming lag?

July 3, 2005 9:31 AM

Should I not expect to be able to play online games over Wifi? Does enabling WEP only make it worse?

I recently checked out City of Heroes (awesome game) for the first time, and had lots of network issues from the start. An abundance of lag and lots of "lost connection to mapserver" errors every few minutes. I have a shared cable connection at an apartment complex. No cable modem, just a jack on the wall. From there I use a Linksys WRT54G router and a USB wireless apapter. For web surfing etc., the connection works just fine. But not for gaming. Today I tried bypassing the router and plugging directly into my PC network card, and City of Heroes played flawlessly. So is there anything I could change in my router configuration to be able to play wirelessly? Or do I need something like this or one of the new gaming-specific wireless routers? Thanks, ask MeFi!
P.S., I wish I could articulate this question a bit better but I've been up playing this horribly addictive game for much too long now and my brain is mush. :)

posted by dustinAFN to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Have you downloaded the latest firmware for the WRT54G? Linksys just released 4.00.7, which resolves some issues with large file transfers, QoS, and generally improves performance. My own network seems far snappier with the new firmware.

Also, placement can have a major effect on both throughput and latency; if you're not getting a strong signal at your PC, then no, gaming over wi-fi generally doesn't work very well. You may want to experiment with where you have both your router and your access point. If the problem is signal strength regardless of placement, then a booster may have some benefit.

WEP will cause a performance hit -- but whether that performance hit affects you depends again on the signal strength. With an extremely good signal, you can get away with it. With a signal that's iffy without WEP, enabling WEP will likely make it unusable.
posted by eschatfische at 10:02 AM on July 3, 2005

It depends on the game. But basically, yes, a wireless link is gonna suck for serious PC games.

The primary problem is that even in the best conditions, wireless links lose packets. Depending on how the game is written lost packets generally mean having to wait for a retransmit (causing visible lag) or else losing some potentially-important data updates. Either way it kinda crimps your gaming style, even in a relatively network-friendly game like CoH.

Another problem is that wireless links introduce latency. I believe latency is something the "gaming routers" try to optimize. But maybe it's not necessary anymore? My WRT54G seems to add about 4ms of latency, at least to ping packets. That's not so bad: you probably have 70ms+ to the game server on the Internet.

(An historical aside. In the old old days of online gaming we played Netrek. One day someone recoded Netrek to use UDP instead of TCP. If you lost a packet that meant you may lose an important update, like a torpedo that was shot at you. But then again if you lost a packet you wouldn't have to wait 150ms+ for it to be retransmitted. The result was a much much better experience on the real Internet. For some reason modern games seem mostly to use TCP, which means if you lose packets you lag. Then again unless you have a wireless link in the path the modern Internet generally doesn't lose packets.)

(A second aside. The WRT54G seems good, but the WRT54GS, at least with original firmware, corrupts packets. It made World of Warcraft unplayable.)
posted by Nelson at 10:04 AM on July 3, 2005

FWIW, I use wifi for Guild Wars (and not even the super g wifo or anything cool) and latancy is not a problem for me. Even when I used to play WoW, it wasn't too big of a deal, though lag was quite noticable during raids.
posted by jmd82 at 10:14 AM on July 3, 2005

Not sure if consoles are much different, but I have two Xboxes, one uses a wired connection, the other wireless (to a Linksys WAP54G). I had some trouble trying to use a Linksys WET11 bridge connected to the wireless network (sometimes it was flawless, sometimes it wouldn't connect at all). I solved the problem by getting Microsoft's Xbox-branded wireless bridge and don't have much if any problems playing wirelessly on the XBox now. I can't tell the difference between the wired and wireless connections, but not sure if games like Halo 2 would use more or less bandwidth than a PC MMORPG.
posted by robbie01 at 12:35 PM on July 3, 2005

What eschatfische said, but with one addition. MAKE SURE 802.1x AUTHENTICATION IS OFF! That shit will majorly screw up any constant connection. Also, WEP 64 is much easier for the connection than WEP 128. If it still lags after you find a good spot, you can try turning off WEP, but if you do that you may have a vulnerable network. If you can, have only registered MAC addresses able to access network resources.
posted by mystyk at 4:02 PM on July 3, 2005

I use wireless for World Of Warcraft and it seems to be fine. It's just a plain old Netgear 802.11b WAP too.
posted by krisjohn at 7:09 PM on July 3, 2005

Agree with krisjohn: I WoW with a D-Link 604 wireless and have never had any problem, I also play WoW from my wired desktop and I've never noticed a difference between the two.
posted by Cosine at 9:28 AM on July 4, 2005