Is gaming over wifi acceptable now?

Moving house shortly and have been secretly agonising about the internet for gaming, though I have been keeping that a secret as a father aged 40.

The phone line comes in downstairs and my PC will be upstairs and I really cant see how to get it hard-wired in.

So my question is, that I know I can get 80/40 and have a generous budget to indulge myself, are these new super routers that look like alien spaceships coupled with a decent wireless cards up to the task?

Let's say I had £250 to spend on the router and card, am I likely to get annoyed?

It'd cost a lot less to run some cable.

it makes so little difference it's not worth worrying about.

by that what i mean is i have a friend who has the worst broadband you could imagine he has like 1.5 MB download and a worse upload. yet he has a 3.0 K/D in trials which is the hardest pvp mode of destiny.

i have another friend who has a high k/d in trials and games on a tv with terrible lag. he plays on a £250 polaroid 50" tv.

basically game skill matters 100 times more than what your ping, refresh rate, input lag, etc is. forget about wifi interfering it makes zero difference in the real world. game skill is the biggest deciding factor.

I've had no issues over wifi

I gamed over Wi-Fi for years without issue. As long as you get a good strong signal you'll be fine.

Powerline would be better than WiFi, Ethernet would be better than both. It's really not that hard to run an Ethernet cable, just go outside the house and up the external wall with it.

I went to great pains to run ethernet cable even though my WiFi is strong and reliable. The reasons were wanting the belt and braces best way to connect my computer to the internet and not having to worry if ping and speed problems were being caused by my WiFi or my ISP.

WiFi would have been fine, but I always want things gold plated so I ran ethernet under floor boards, behind walls, through the loft, on the outside walls; however I could do it.

gold plated ?

"the best"

Wifi increases my latency by about 0.25ms, jitter is low too on 5ghz.

Devices conforming to modern standards are a significant improvement on those in years gone by, increasing bandwidth through use of Mi-Mo, beamforming, and avoiding interference by using a frequency range based around 5GHz. While gaming over a wireless connection has been suitable for many years, the devil in in the details. Like many things, it depends on your exact use case and requirements.

The historic unacceptability that you refer to is most likely down to the use of the 2.4GHz 802.11 standards which have been so popular. The relatively recent widespread adoption of 5GHz does away with most of the issues found with the 2.4GHz standards, mainly the interference from the huge number of other devices competing for what is essentially only 3 channels over the 2.4GHz space. If you don't have too many neighbours, cordless phones, baby monitors or other devices broadcasting on 2.4GHz, and you don't mind experiencing dropouts from microwave use then WiFi will have been acceptable for a long time. If any of these are issues for you, then you can be glad that any modern device will be at least 802.11n, or preferably 802.11ac, which should be vastly superior to previous b and g standards as they occupy that less populated 5GHz frequency range.

This being said, running a cable (externally) is extremely cheap and and a far better long term solution for stationary devices on your network. Only you can gauge the vialibility and effort:value ratio of doing this, however.

If running cable internally isn't an option, then I'd suggest moving in to your new place and seeing what experience you get with the wireless router supplied by your ISP. If you notice no issues, problem solved. If you notice issues, come back here and people will be able to give more specific guidance.

I'm using the standard Virgin router and pings are fine.
A decent 5g wireless network card (£40 one) was better than the USB one I had before.

I personally don't feel the need for anything better, your milage may vary.

Used wireless for years now and zero issues, I have always got my max speed and a good ping, atm that is 150MB dll and 10MB upload.

Only problem I have with wireless adaptors now is 5GHz is not stable but this is a problem with W10

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18756145

Still, even on 2.4GHz, no complaints from me.

Psycho Sonny said:

basically game skill matters 100 times more than what your ping, refresh rate, input lag, etc is. forget about wifi interfering it makes zero difference in the real world. game skill is the biggest deciding factor.

Click to expand...

This.

The ideal solution is a cable for all the benefits it brings. Full speed, fewer issues, it'll just work. However gaming over wifi is usually fine unless you're really that good and playing a very latency sensitive fps.

Depending on how far from your router it can be ok, but I find wired or powerlines to be better than wifi most of the time.

hawky525 said:

Depending on how far from your router it can be ok, but I find wired or powerlines to be better than wifi most of the time.

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Don't powerlines have huge amounts of latency they are good for bandwidth so downloading big files but not for gaming. This was the consensus last time and it's a standard thing you cannot really improve due to the way your house is built. Unless there has been a huge improvement in the tech over the past 5-10 years.

Basically powerlines is good for streaming / downloading but not gaming.

Psycho Sonny said:

Don't powerlines have huge amounts of latency they are good for bandwidth so downloading big files but not for gaming. This was the consensus last time and it's a standard thing you cannot really improve due to the way your house is built. Unless there has been a huge improvement in the tech over the past 5-10 years.

Basically powerlines is good for streaming / downloading but not gaming.

Click to expand...

This is false, powerlines are fine for gaming.

Thanks for the varied responses.

- Powerline adaptors are a no go due to the wiring and to be honest I use them currently and they annoy me a lot with drop-outs.

- As advised by Zefan, I will get moved and the broadband installed first and see how it measures up. A friend is an electrician so will see what they think about hard-wiring.

- If no good, going to get a router that looks like a spaceship and an adaptor. Something like a TP-Link Archer AC3200 Wireless Tri-Band Gigabit Router with a TP-Link Archer T9E AC1900 Wireless Dual Band PCI Express Adapter.

I tried a TP Link and it was awful. One of their new fancy ones which cost £170 too. or was it D-Link the company now owned by Cisco.

I swear by ASUS not let me down in the router department. I've had about 4 different ones now over the past 6-8 years.

No doubt ASUS are good but they screwed me over on a legitimate RMA a few years ago and I will never buy anything off them again.

Running a TP-Link router for the last few years and it has been flawless.