Online gaming ok with a wireless connection ?

My lad play his Xbox wireless, and has no issues.....
I'm on a 4 meg line...
 
DampCat said:
I dont touch my wireless for anything other than convenience for portable devices (iPod touch etc).

Cabled network is just so much mroe reliale for me. I get connection drops throughout the house on wireless.
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I'm inclined to agree.

Also if anyone asks for help troubleshooting their network problems, as soon as they mention wireless, I mention "do one" :D
 
I've gamed on a wireless network for years. Never really had any problems with it to be honest.

At the moment I am wired in however, but only because the router sits on my desk now, and I know it is "supposed" to be more stable.
 
I would never go back to wireless. Nothing tops having a direct cable line, as I know that all my packets will get there without problems.
 
wireless is fine with an RTS, but FPS it is bad. I have had terrible experiences with wireless. Even in RTS' i would get random lag spikes. It all went away when I used a cable. But that was me palying with 2 or 3 bars out of 5.
 
Ah, this would explain my current problem, ocassionally (read every few bloody minutes) I get a split second packet drop (normally right about the moment I'm about to engage an enemy) which leads to the game momentarily freezing and the next moment me lying dead somewhere.

In that case I would heartily recommend against wireless for online FPS games if you can avoid it though try it and see if you find it acceptable.

Unfortunately, I'm caught between a rock and a hard place, either having intermittent packet loss with wireless or hard-drive stalling problems with wired :(
 
I normally get 2 out of 5 bars with my wireless connection and on FPS it was terrible. RTS weren't so bad but Counter Strike got huge lagspikes all the time. Eventually i just got a 30m ethernet cable since theyre only around £10
 
Antar Bolaeisk said:
Ah, this would explain my current problem, ocassionally (read every few bloody minutes) I get a split second packet drop (normally right about the moment I'm about to engage an enemy) which leads to the game momentarily freezing and the next moment me lying dead somewhere
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Vicious said:
i used to play wow on a wireless connection.

tried both a usb adapter and a pci card. Every so often (few mins) i get a lag spike of a few secs where the game would freeze. In the end i got too annoyed and went back to ethernet. this was about 2 years ago though so things may have changed. I would imagine its fine for rts though.
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Almost certainly down to Windows polling for wireless devices.
Try this guys, it should eliminate those brief periods of 100% pl: http://www.martin-majowski.de/wlanoptimizer/
 
It depends a lot on the quality of the adapter - I currently have two USB ones which I switch between. The one I use for gaming is utterly flawless for it, no lag spikes whatsoever. However it can't sustain a constant download speed of more than 500kb/s as it's semi broken and will only work under USB 1.1.

The other is awful for gaming, it has massive lag spikes every minute or so making FPSs unplayable. However it can sustain download speeds of 2300+kb/s so I use it when I'm not gaming.

If going wireless is the only option then get good quality stuff. Cheapo £10 crap is useless for gaming, get something of decent quality, no less than £20 cost of a well known quality brand (Belkin, Linksys etc.) The good quality stuff will easily rival wired, but will never surpass it in any aspect other than convenience.
 
I am on wireless with a cheapo PCI card with atenna (cost me £12) and never have any lag issues with a netgear wireless router. However, you will find many horror stories on the internet about wireless gaming. Some people are lucky, some people are unlucky, that's the view I have on it really.
 
LabR@t said:
i used to i had to use http://vista-anti-lag.software.informer.com/ to get rid of the lag spikes i was getting with my wifi card .


you might not get one
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Great piece of software, never had problems with my old laptops or on my old router, but with my desktop and new router this was a necessity to keep online games playable.
EDIT: believe the problem is the OS automatically refreshing/searching for any wireless signals, on XP you can disable it no luck on vista though.
 
Mahnsikir said:
Great piece of software, never had problems with my old laptops or on my old router, but with my desktop and new router this was a necessity to keep online games playable.
EDIT: believe the problem is the OS automatically refreshing/searching for any wireless signals, on XP you can disable it no luck on vista though.
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How do you disable it in XP mate, thanks
 
Tested this one day with my laptop on cod 4. Playing on my clans server loaded up cod on laptop and pc - all settings the same (copied profile settings) and there was a 30ms ping difference between the two with my computer around 50 and laptop in the 80 mark.
My brother plays xbox with wireless and he always has bad connection, though he's got used to it now and doesn't notice it.
I would always choose wired over wireless.
 
n1kunj said:
If going wireless is the only option then get good quality stuff. Cheapo £10 crap is useless for gaming, get something of decent quality, no less than £20 cost of a well known quality brand (Belkin, Linksys etc.) The good quality stuff will easily rival wired, but will never surpass it in any aspect other than convenience.
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i know above I've said to use a cable..

but there's a Safecom usb2 adaptor (atheros chipset), that was flawless for gaming, used it comfortably for 6 months before getting tired of the slow transfer speeds and drilling a hole in the wall for my gigabit cable

that costs about 8-12 quid
 
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